[Re: Stock trades and realized gains/losses]

[Jim McCormick]

I'd like to add my strong support to Matthew Vanecek's proposal for
accounting for gains and losses on stock trades.  I haven't quite
absorbed all the details, but it meets what I see as the main
requirements for such accounting:

  1) Don't break double entry accounting rules.
     
     This should be the most important requirement for every GnuCash
feature.  Once you break this rule, you have taken away the ability of
the user to do things you never thought of or haven't had time to code
up.  Adding fancy report capabilities does NOT solve this problem. 
Double entry accounting is THE major feature advantage that GnuCash has
over something like Quicken.  GnuCash can add ease of use features on
top of double entry accounting in order to match Quicken's ease of use. 
Quicken cannot add the power of double entry accounting to allow users
to do things they haven't yet coded up.  By the way, for some reason,
many of the GnuCash reporting features have never worked for me.  This
is another topic for another time, but I mention it because it hasn't
caused me any great pain except of the case of stocks.  Except for
stocks, my account structure provides most of the important information
I need - because of double entry accounting.  (Yes, I like and want nice
reporting capabilities, but NEVER at the cost of double entry
accounting.)

  2) For tax accounting purposes, Gnucash must be able to track lots of
stock.  Enough said.

I would also like to (re)emphasize that this stock accounting issue is
just the most obvious case of needing to do accounting in two different
units (in this case units of stock and units of a particular currency). 
Multiple currencies and inventory are other examples of needing to do
accounting in two different units.

  -Jim McCormick  



-- 
Jim McCormick <james_mccormick@yahoo.com>