Huh? Starting out with gnucash (new accounts, etc)

Daniel Hagerty Daniel Hagerty <hag@linnaean.org>
Mon, 18 Jun 2001 16:07:46 -0400


 > From: Andrew Wallace <andyw@scroom.com>
 > Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 12:48:16 -0700
 >
 > Ok, I guess the real problem I have is not understanding where the
 > money comes from so much as actually trying to understand how to
 > set this all up. I have an old brokerage account that I want to put
 > into gnucash. How do I do this? How do I say that "i bought 60 shares
 > of company A on 2/18/2000 for x dollars per share". Do I have to
 > create the account with the exact amount of cash necessary to handle
 > the dozens of transactions, then start entering all the necessary
 > transactions? I mean, to make this happen, I have to enter  a lot of
 > transactions that are self-cancelling (i.e., I bought the stock, and
 > then sold it, so all I have left are the effects of having had it,
 > either profit or loss).

    That's an "it depends on how you want to think about it".  You can
either ignore the stock transactions and transfer the *results* of
them from equity, or you can include them, taking the money that you
bought the stock with from equity and doing the rest within your
accounted system.

    If you're trying to match your accounting with your tax reporting,
you probably don't want to deal with the stock transactions on your
books for this year unless they happened in this tax year.