personal financing: how to record receiving of a gift (not fixed asset)

[Greg Troxel]

  Yes I wish to record gifts of objects not carried as assets. I
  probably should keep it in a separate file, but I don't know what bad
  thing will happen if I keep it in GnuCash? It's the most convenient
  and I don't see the down side doing so. There is actually another
  upside: I can easily get a sum of a friend's gifts through years as or
  not as assets; otherwise I have to count the total of his gifts as
  assets in Gnu Cash, and open "gift notes.txt"to sum the consumed gift
  together manually, to get an impression how much I got from him in
  total.

The basic issue is double-entry accounting, with the notion that assets
and liabilites (including equity) balance, and that income-expense
changes net assets.  Once you buy into this --- which you implicitly do
when you choose to use gnucash --- then you have to choose for each type
of thing whether you treat it as a thing of value in your accounting
system or as having no value, and then treat transactions consistently.
If you record gift income, you have to also record an increase in the
value of some asset, because otherwise your accounts will no longer
balance.  This isn't artificial - this consistency check is *the point*
of double-entry accounting.

You could handle this by having a gift income and assets account each
outside the normal hierarchy (meaning not rolling up to total income and
total assets) so that you have the traditional accounting equations in
your real accounts, and then gift income and gift assets separately.
You would enter transactions between those, and they would not affect
the 'real' accounts.  You could perhaps do this by defining a valueless
currency and entering the gifts in that currency so they can be totaled
but have zero worth.

So, I would suggest that you study an accounting textbook; you are
heading down a tricky path and without a thorough understanding of the
fundamentals you are very likely to get yourself into trouble.