Trading Account Problems

[Mike Alexander]

--On December 5, 2011 10:10:31 AM -0800 "David T." 
<sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 1) Tracking down documentation is difficult; as far as I can tell
> there is only one note about using Trading Accounts, which refers to
> an outside tutorial. That tutorial (and the placement of the Gnucash
> note) focus on currency trading, rather than stocks. Mike, your
> comment suggests that trading accounts affect stock transactions as
> well, which really should be clearly stated for users of Gnucash. The
> documentation for Gnucash needs beefing up by someone familiar with
> the feature set, with clear instruction on how a Gnucash user will
> apply the principles outlined in the external tutorial. The emphasis
> really needs to be on how this feature set is used and how it
> functions in Gnucash.

I write code, not documentation (trust me, that's the way you want it). 
I think there is enough information out there for someone to write a 
first draft of good documentation.  I would be glad to work with such a 
person to refine it.  If someone wants to contribute to Gnucash, this 
would be a good way to do it.

Trading accounts will be used in any transaction where the splits are 
not all in the same commodity.  The multiple commodities can be two or 
more currencies or other commodities.

>
> 2) The non-reversible nature of this choice needs to be either
> changed so that users can reverse the option without hosing their
> data, or the unreversible nature of the choice needs to be
> prominently noted. Frankly, if I were Per, I'd be pretty frustrated
> right about now.

Perhaps you're right, but this is the first anyone has asked about 
this.  The best advice is to make a backup of your file before playing 
with this.  As I said before it might work to just delete all the 
trading accounts and related splits.

          Mike