Gold as Commodity?

[John Ralls]

> On Jan 26, 2017, at 7:18 AM, Lane Lester <lane.lester at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 10:45 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> If you want to use the XAU currency for Gold then the account must be of type Asset or Bank.
> 
> I tried setting up an Asset account that way with "XAU (Gold)" as the Security/currency. When I entered the transactions, I put the weight of gold in the Increase column. I clicked to save the transaction, and a new window came up: Transfer Funds. Everything was filled out, but I had to choose Currency Transfer as either Exchange Rate or To Amount. I had to choose the latter to get the purchase amount charged to my credit card account.
> 
> Somehow the correct amount got charged to my card, even though the price of gold has changed since I made the purchase. The gold account register doesn't show any dollar amounts, only weights.
> 
> It seems there's no way to track the value of the physical gold in GnuCash. It's not a bit deal; I just wanted to see if it's possible.
> 

Please remember to copy the list on all replies.

You can retrieve prices for XAU with Finance::Quote. See http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.6/C/gnucash-guide/invest-stockprice1.html#invest-stockprice-auto2 for instructions on setting it up. Now wether those are useful prices is another matter entirely, and you might prefer to get prices from another source and enter them manually. Instructions for that are in the preceding section.

Regards,
John Ralls