Problem creating a "Currency" account.

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Charles Day <cedayiv at gmail.com>:

>> If GnuCash lets you do this then this is a bug and should be fixed.
>> You shouldn't be able to have Income/Expense accounts in non-currency
>> commodities.
>>
>
> An income account denominated in a non-currency makes sense if the user is
> trying to automatically keep track of capital gains for non-currencies using
> Peter Selinger's tutorial (implement trading accounts). So it seems like an
> exception would need to be made in order to allow that.

no, it still doesn't make sense.  You're not making income of the
stock.  It's just a change in the equity holding of the stock.  The
income is all about the change in value made when you trade the stock
in for a currency (or dividends, but that's a different beast).

you do not need an "Income" account -- it can be an Equity account
(or indeed an ASSET account).

I still maintain that Peter is wrong in that he conflates Realized
with Unrealized cap gains

I need to look at Mike Alexander's patch.  I wonder if we need a
"trading" account type that is neither equity nor income as a special
account type to handle this.

> Heck, in theory I don't see why any account couldn't be denominated in a
> non-currency. It could even be the "home" currency, though I don't know why
> someone would have a need for that.
>
> But GnuCash isn't designed that way. Non-currencies have been fenced off for
> some reason (Does anyone know why?). So there are probably hidden side
> effects in using Fred's workaround.
>
> So maybe, for the moment, using trading accounts for non-currencies is not
> supported by GnuCash. So unless you want to try Fred's workaround and see
> what happens, it looks like you're stuck with using SSAP 20 to keep the
> books in balance for non-currencies. :(
>
> If we have a discussion about how to implement trading accounts on
> gnucash-devel, I'll be happy to participate. I meant to start one, but have
> just been swamped the last few days.

We've had several discussions over the past few years.

> Cheers,
> Charles
>
> -derek

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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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