Investments

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Sun Nov 21 21:14:51 EST 2010


On Nov 21, 2010, at 1:16 PM, Dennis Powless wrote:

> I kinda figured this out.... took me a while.
> 
> So, I guess I kinda determined that for a mutual fund... I need
> several accounts.
> 
> actual mutual fund account in assets:investments.....
> 
> A cash account to hold cash holdings....  income:cash reserves
> 
> A dividends accounts    income:dividends
> 
> 
> 
> I get dividends and I have to put them into the dividends account,
> then move the funds as buy in the mutual fund.  The cash that is held
> is then moved into the cash account.  Then when it is needed or used
> for buys it is moved to the mutual fund account.
> 
> When I buy shares (contribution from work income) I will transfer
> funds from my paycheck into the mutual fund.  Is this correct?
> 
> Does this all sound correct?  It's not very clear in the help guides.....
> 


Nope.

You still don't get the double-entry accounting thing. Study the guide some more, look on the web (I got 292000 hits for "double-entry tutorial" from Google), maybe even buy a book.

Anyway, you need at least the following accounts:

Assets
	401K
		Cash
		Fund ABC
	Roth
		Cash
		Fund XYZ
	First National Bank (Checking)

Income
	TaxDeferred
		Dividends
		Wage/Salary Contributions
	Taxable
		Wage/Salary

Every transaction shows up in two accounts, a source and a destination. For "new money" (dividends or pay), the source is the appropriate income account, and the destination is one of the asset cash accounts (of which the checking account is one). When you buy shares in a fund, the source is the appropriate cash account and the destination is the fund account.

You may find it helpful at tax time (or when you retire) to have separate dividend accounts for each major asset account. That's up to you. (I don't do that, and I have pretty complicated taxes.) You'll also want expense accounts and liability accounts (credit cards, mortgage, car loan, etc.)

Regards,
John Ralls

> On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 9:49 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>> 
>> On Nov 20, 2010, at 9:40 PM, Dennis Powless wrote:
>> 
>>> I'm having some difficulty setting up my retirement account in GC.  I
>>> imported all my data from quicken.  I don't have a complicated
>>> portfolio, I just have two accounts both held at the same company.
>>> 
>>> I have a Roth IRA and a 403B at work.  The amounts are all messed up
>>> from the import, showing large negative numbers :(   supposed to be
>>> positive.
>>> 
>>> I have run the new account druid to get the hierarchy, which gives me
>>> the correct accounts.
>>> 
>>> I wanted to start over and re-enter all the data...
>>> 
>>> I set up accounts
>>> 
>>> assets:investments:XYZ company:RothIRA
>>> assets:investments:XYZ company:403B
>>> 
>>> 
>>> The issue is, the accounts are only set up just like all the other
>>> ones just in and out..... no sell, buy tot shares  etc...
>>> 
>>> 
>>> What am I doing wrong?
>> 
>> You will  need to set up a sub-account under each for each stock/bond/mutual fund that you own. Those sub-accounts will be of type "stock" and will have as "currency" the actual stock. That will enable the buy and sell columns.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>> 
>> 
>> 



More information about the gnucash-user mailing list