Sell stocks with a profit: Capital gains

[Chris Good]

Alex,

I'm no expert, but I have found that if you don't account for the capital gain or loss correctly, then the trial balance will be out by that amount. I kept running a trial balance as at different dates, and eventually figured out it was the sale of all the shares with an error in the amount of the capital gain, that was causing the trial balance to be wrong. 

If anyone knows of a different way to ensure you have correctly accounted for the gain or loss, I'd be glad know?

Note: the last time I looked, the note that David was talking about re tabbing out of the split when entering a stock transaction (ie any transaction that adds or removes a qty of shares) was only in the unstable documentation, not the stable documentation.

Regards,

Chris Good

Message: 10
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2013 12:06:31 -0800 (PST)
From: "David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
To: Alexander Engelhardt <kamaitachi at gmx.de>,
   "gnucash-user at gnucash.org" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: Re: Sell stocks with a profit: Capital gains
Message-ID:
   <1357243591.27285.YahooMailNeo at web39304.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Alex--

Gnucash can be challenging in this scenario. However, if you follow the instructions in the Guide page you referenced, you should come out right. Basically, you need to document the capital gain as income; this is explained and the steps are outlined in the second paragraph of the guide. 

The example in 8.7.1 shows what you need to do. Pay specific attention to line 3 of this example, which shows "Assets:Stock:SYMBOL" followed by 0 shares and 0 price with a buy value of $1600. That's the line you need, which in your case would read "Assets:Current Assets:myfund" "0", "0" and "200"

Next, you'll balance this with a split from an appropriate income account, which is shown in the example on Line 4.

That should document the profit on your sale.

Be sure to heed the note that tells you to Tab out of the split, or you'll have headaches. 


HTH, 

David



________________________________
From: Alexander Engelhardt <kamaitachi at gmx.de>
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org 
Sent: Thursday, January 3, 2013 7:08 AM
Subject: Sell stocks with a profit: Capital gains

Hello Gnucash users,

I have only today read this section of the manual:
http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.4/C/gnucash-guide/invest-sell1.html#invest-sellexample2

So before that, I have entered my actions of selling stocks in a different way, without the Income:Capital Gains account. Here is an example of how I entered my sells:
http://i.imgur.com/8PvZi.png

In this simple example, I bought 10 stocks for 100? each, i.e. spent 1000?. Then I sold the 10 pieces for 120? each, i.e. gained 1200?. This is a 200? increase in my net assets, but there is no income account where the 200? came from.
When I have done it this way, I now believe that I have created 200? out of nothing. I don't understand where they come from, and why GnuCash didn't complain when I entered it this way.

Can anyone clear this up for me?

Thanks in advance,
Alex