Stocks and Balancing Accounts

[Derek Atkins]

Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu> writes:

> This was discussed on gnucash-devel last year and there was no 
> consensus that it was a good idea.  See, for example, the thread 
> starting with 
> <https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2007-March/020071.html>. 
> Since it is a significant change it probably won't get done unless 
> there is a consensus that it is an improvement.

For the record, I have (finally) read Peter Selinger's web page.
I still disagree with many of his assumptions and some of his
conclusions.  For example, I still completely disagree with his
conflation of realized vs. unrealized gains.

I do see the value in keeping track of the commodities.  HOWEVER, I
still maintain that those commodity accounts (be them Income or Equity
accounts) should be HIDDEN from the user experience.  They should not
show up in the CoA, and ideally they should not show up in a
transaction view from the register, either.  But I do agree that
GnuCash should track them as if they DO exist.

My reasoning is that when I go to a bank and exchange $100 for
€74.29 I don't mentally consider it a split transaction, and indeed
as far as *I* am concerned it ISNT a Split transaction.  The fact
that it's an exchange should not MAKE it a split transaction.
Now, if there were a commission fee associated, then obviously
the commission could either be considered part of the exchange rate
or it could be its own split.  Probably it should be its own split.
But adding two additional "real" splits to account for the exchange
just makes it visually messy.

But after reading Peter's document I do agree that it is necessary to
maintain that extra information somewhere, somehow.

So let's move this discussion over to -devel and discuss the best
way to present this in the UI in a clear, consise way that doesn't
bloat the UI or add lots of additional cruft.

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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