Unrealized/Realized Gains and Losses

[Linas Vepstas]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 12:04:49PM -0500, Bill Gribble was heard to remark:
> On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 06:57:51PM +0200, Moln?r S?ndor G?bor wrote:
> > 	I think it would be great if unrealized income, expense,
> > assets etc.. type of account exists. When the income realized the
> > transaction have to move into the realized account(s).
> 
> These aren't appropriate for account types (IMO), but there should be
> better reports demonstrating unrealized gains and losses for just
> these purposes.  It should be part of the portfolio report, for
> example.

Umm, this is similar to the earlier 'cash flow' argument.  How can the
report generator tell apart 'unrealized' loss from 'ordinary depreciation' 
if there isn't  at least have a checkbox on the account?  (the alternative
is to have a checkbox on each transaction). 

> I don't really use any of the stock-related features of gnucash so I

This is not just a stock thing, its also for ordinary assets. 
You can't assume that there will be a 'price'.  e.g. lets say we
depreciate assets on a straight-line, 5-year schedule.  You don't want
to create a separate account for each asset (and track a separate price
for each one), you want to stick them in one account and treat them as a
group.  Viz. Gnumatic assets: since they were bought as componenents,
they got reported to the IRS as components.  Each individual CPU fan is
reported as a separate line item, and depreciated over 5 years.
There's 8 pages of line items, several hundred items -- I'd hate to have
to create hundreds of accounts, hundreds of prices, just to track cpu
cooler fans.  Maybe I'm wrong, but we need some kind of labor-saving
thingy for this suituation.

--linas

-- 
I'm very PUBLIC-MINDED, I'm helping a NIGERIAN get his $25,000,000 back!