Unrealized Gains and Stocks

[Gregory Novak]

"Charles M. Gajan" <charlesgajan at earthlink.net> writes:
> Stocks are tracked by share, and the price in the price editor ("get
> quotes") so the unrealized gains (losses) are only for the last quote
> entered. Unless there is a split, sale or purchases the number of shares
> is the number of shares. The only change in value would be at the time
> of sale.

All undeniably true, but not the information I was after.

The _purpose_ for doing this is to get a complete, year-end snapshot
of my (negative) net worth.  That is, when I first set myself up into
Gnucash, the "Starting Balances" account contains a complete tally of
my assets/liabilities at one moment.  As time goes by, that number
becomes less and less relevant because it's so far in the past.

What I'd like to do is "reset" Gnucash once per year so that one
account displays my net worth at the start of the year, and the
difference between my income and expense accounts shows profit/loss
for the year, rather than all the time I've been using Gnucash.

I could do this by "closing the books" once per year and holding each
year in a separate Gnucash file.  But then it would be annoying to
search for transactions or to look at old reports.  So I'm trying to
simulate this effect without actually using a new file.

Making a year-end transfer from each income/expense account to
"Starting Balances" _almost_ archives what I want, but there's a small
residual difference between "Starting Balances + Income - Expenses"
and "Assets - Liabilities."   That difference comes (for me) from
capital gains due to price changes on stocks that I hold but didn't
sell.  I would like to book a "tentative" amount of income for the
year due to stock price changes for 2005.

Is there a way to do this, or will I break things trying?

Thanks,
Greg