Need help with Gnucash --Steps to enable On-line price updating

sandesh rokade sandeshr at hotmail.com
Mon Dec 17 05:49:12 EST 2007


.
 
Hi 
I am trying to create portfolio of stocks and mutual funds in india. I guess I have set the accounts correctly as per the help, however I do not get on-line price updates. Looks like this software works for india, however I have not been able to figure it out how to do it. Any help you can provide will be appreciated. 
 
Under Type, how do I select exchange that is supported for this commodity. In this case it is NSE. Can I tweak template and use it?
 
Regrads
 
 
 




Steps to enable On-line price updating



Create the Account for the mutual fund or stock with it listed in the Security/Currency field, as described above.

Tip
When creating these accounts it is a good time to create income accounts to track dividends, capital gains (long and short) and expense account(s) for tracking commissions and losses (if you track losses as expenses).

Create the mutual fund or stock with either the Security Editor for existing stock/funds or the New Security/Currency dialog for a new stock/fund.
Select Get On-line Quotes:, Type of Quote Source and Timezone.
Online currency quotes require that the check-box for Online quotes and the timezone be selected in the Security screen and the Security Editor check-box for "get quote" box is checked for those currencies that are to be downloaded.



Get On-line Quotes: This check-box is to enable this security/fund to have quotes downloaded from an on-line source.

Type of Quote Source use the radio buttons to select the type of source for the Online quotes. Multiple: quote sources like "Europe" should be used if fail-over to multiple sites are desirable. Single: selections will only return information from the specified source.
After selecting the type of source for price quotes, select a quote source from the pull-down menu. Currently among the supported quote sources are; Yahoo, Yahoo Europe, Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price, the Vanguard Group, the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) and TIAA-CREF.

Note
Note that Yahoo will provide price quotes for many mutual funds including Fidelity, T.Rowe Price and Vanguard, and that the quoted prices at Yahoo should be identical to those that may be found at the source sites.
If you choose Yahoo Europe or Europe, you should append the market code for the security, such as PA for Paris, BE for Berlin, etc. Example: 12150.PA (a Peugeot security in the Paris market). Table A.1, “Exchange Codes List for European Markets” below lists codes for various European markets.
Pseudo-symbols for TIAA-CREF funds are listed in table Table A.2, “Pseudo-symbols that can be used for TIAA-CREF quotes”. 

Timezone for these quotes: Select the timezone for the source of the on-line quotes you are receiving. For example, Yahoo normally quotes Eastern timezone, so choose America/New York if you use that quote source.

To determine if the Perl module Finance::Quote is already installed on your system, type “perldoc Finance::Quote” in a terminal window and check to see if there is any documentation available. If you see the documentation, then the module is installed, if you do not see the documentation, then it has not been installed.
To install Finance::Quote;



Close any GnuCash applications you have running.

Locate the folder where GnuCash is installed by searching for “gnc-fq-update” (without the quotes).

Change to that directory, open a root shell and run the command “gnc-fq-update” (without the quotation marks). This will launch a Perl CPAN update session that will go out onto the Internet and install the Finance::Quote module on your system. The gnc-fq-update program is interactive, however, with most systems you should be able to answer “no” to the first question: “Are you ready for manual configuration? [yes]” and the update will continue automatically from that point.
After installation is complete, you should run the “gnc-fq-dump” test program, in the same directory, distributed with GnuCash to test if Finance::Quote is installed and working properly.

Note
If you feel uncomfortable about performing any of these steps, please either email the GnuCash-user mailing list (<gnucash-user at gnucash.org>) for help or come to the GnuCash IRC channel on irc.gnome.org. You can also leave out this step and manually update your stock prices.

Select a commodity to the Price Editor.

Select Get Quotes in the Price Editor.

Check the latest price for the selected security.
If you wish to update price quotes from the command line, you can do so by the following command;
gnucash --add-price-quotes <gnucash-file-name> 
The command gnucash --add-price-quotes <gnucash-file-name> can be used to fetch the current prices of your stocks. The file specified “<gnucash-file-name>” will depend on the name and location of your data file. This can be determined by the name displayed in the top frame of the GnuCash window, before the “-”. The file name can also be found “File ->” “pull down list”, the first item, numbered 1, is the name of the currently open file.
This can be automated by creating a crontab entry. For example, to update your file every Friday evening (18:00) after markets close (modify the time accordingly for your time zone), you could add the following to your personal crontab:
0 18 * * 5 gnucash --add-price-quotes $HOME/gnucash-filename > /dev/null 2>&1
Remember that Mutual Fund “prices” are really “Net Asset Value” and require several hours after the exchange closes before being available. If NAVs are downloaded before the current days NAVs are determined, yesterday's NAVs are retrieved.




Opening Balance
The Opening Balance tab is visible only when creating a new account. It is used to record the beginning balance for an account. This allows it to be used for two different scenarios. If using GnuCash for the first time to record transactions, it can be used as a beginning balance. If the accounts in use are closed at the end of a period and new accounts are created, it is used to close and carry balances forward.
There are three panes in this tab. The top pane contains the Balance Information.



Balance: Enter the balance to start the account with.

Date: Choose here the date the opening balance should be recorded.
The next pane is the Transfer Type pane.



Use Opening Balances Equity account: This transfers the opening balance for the account from a standard Equity account called Opening Balances.

Select Transfer Account: This enables the pane below so a different account can be used to transfer the opening balance.
The last pane is the Transfer Account pane. Select the account to use for opening balances from the list of accounts in this pane.
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