newbie how-to-best-do-it ?

[Frank P. Miles]

Bill Gribble wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Sep 05, 2000 at 11:46:32PM +1100, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> > Frank P. Miles writes:s
> >  >    c) set up an "income" account on higher level
> >  >            Problem: Gnucash can't readily associate the income
> >  >            with its source.  It still gets counted as cost.
> >  > Similar things occur, AFAICT, with bank accounts and such.
> >
> > You're absolutely right - we need the ability to associate dividends
> > (which directly affect only an income and a bank account) with the
> > stock that generates them.
> 
> I must have deleted the first bit of this thread, sorry.
> 
> What's the problem with the way the QIF code does this automatically?
> Each stock you hold has a separate income account for dividends,
> also separated by the brokerage:
> 
> Dean Witter:IBM Common             <---- the STOCK account
> Dividends:Dean Witter:IBM Common   <---- income account for dividends
> 
> This isn't as pretty as it could be, but it correctly keeps the
> information separate.  RSN each account will also have some
> meta-information that will allow you to "group" all the IBM-related
> accounts together, but the way described above doesn't get you any
> wrong answers.  Does it?

When you look at the individual accounts, the numbers are all
reasonable.
The signs take some effort to internalize but that's ok.

Perhaps some of this is all going to be fixed in an updated version.  At
this point, it's a bit hard to understand.  In fact, one concern that I
have (a missing feature) is that while there is an import feature, there
is no export feature (how can I know what the QIF code does
automatically?)
and data are stored in a binary format.  Ah, back to the original
concern...

What I (the proverbial dumb user) would describe as a "wrong answer" is
that when you do a report with the current stable version of gnucash on
the mythical account, the $10 spent in opening the account is added to
the $2 interest/dividends to yield a $12 cost.  This does not make sense
to me, and more importantly makes it hard to evaluate the performance of
a given form of investment.

Thanks to you all for your hard work and thoughtful consideration.

	-frank