Accounting for 401k and other investments

[James Roman]

I have several investment vehicles that allocate money among various
investment funds. While I can identify some of these accounts as clearly
matching up to publicly traded funds, the values reported in my Account
Summaries don't match those of publicly traded stocks or mutual funds. I
assume the disparity between unit values of my investments and the
publicly traded funds is due to the investment company subdividing
ownership of the shares among all participants in the plan, so one unit
is only a fraction of an actual share. I am unable to match up some of
the fund choices to publicly traded mutual funds, based on the
combination of letters that represent each fund. It is possible that
these are fund groups that are privately owned by the investment
company. This means I can not add these commodities into Gnucash,
because the number of shares I own in the fund, don't match up to actual
shares, or I can not provide a valid symbol or abbreviation.

Ultimately, I'd like to account for my 401k and other investment
vehicles like I would if I had a portfolio of mutual funds. I intend to
track the prices of these sub-funds manually. I'd also like to keep
track of how much money is going into brokerage fees for the various
sub-funds. One option I have is to input a bogus abbreviation when
adding the commodity. This would at least allow me to enter the
sub-funds into gnucash, so I could track the unit prices, without
interfering with my automatically tracked investments via
finance::quote. 

I assume that other 401k plans work basically the same way. What other
ways are used to track investments where the value is made up of several
smaller funds, especially when those funds can not be tracked via a
public traded fund?