Setting up an investment account

[david.carlson.417@gmail.com]

    Actually it is correct to have your security accounts denominated in shares of the security rather than in your currency (US dollars).
However, please re-read the section of the help tutorial investments section on buying investments.  It would be better to start with an opening balance of zero shares in the investment share account and then pretend to buy all the shares on December 31st of the previous year at the value per share from your year end statement.  
Rather than create some dummy account use Equity:Opening Balances as your currency transfer account.
Have fun.
David C
Sent from my LG G Pad 7.0 LTE, an AT&T 4G LTE tablet



------ Original message------From: Elmar SchmeisserDate: Tue, Jul 26, 2016 6:25 AMTo: David Reiser;Cc: GNU Cash User;Derek Atkins;Subject:Re: Setting up an investment account
It seems odd to have in the Opening balances list entries in bothdollars (for most of the accounts) and shares for the investmentaccounts.  OTOH, I guess I could create a dummy account called somethinglike "investment funds" in assets, and put an opening balance dated31DEC15 in that which sums all the funds used to buy the shares in allthe various investments (I started using GC on Jan 1 this year, so thereare no entries before 31DEC15).  Then do a buy on 01/01/2016 in theactual investment account using some of those those funds.  Would thatwork as expected?For this particular investment, since I am retired, I can no longer buynew shares in TSP, but I get price updates quarterly.  It doesn't seemthat I can track/graph the share price and/or total value over time inQC if the only way to update the price is to change it in the entry, or ?- elmarOn 7/25/2016 9:42 PM, David Reiser wrote:> Accounts can have only one commodity. So you’ll either have to make> the opening balance in TSP as shares or create another account in> dollars which you can then use to buy shares in the TSP account.> Since your opening balance as of Jan 1 was actually shares in that> account, why not record it that way? You’ll want to enter a price in> the Price Editor under Tools for Jan 1 also, so that you can evaluate> the balance then.> > There are a couple oddities with report settings to get the reports> to use the most appropriate share price (one of the reasons to add> the Jan 1 price to the Price Editor).> > Dave_______________________________________________gnucash-user mailing listgnucash-user at gnucash.orghttps://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user-----Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.