need help with stock investment reporting

[John Morris]

Hi Wm,
  I am also new to GnuCash, so I have not yet worked out all the details. Also, I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to switching from Quicken to GnuCash, so I expect it to take a while yet. So far, I figured out how to munge the .qif from Quicken so GnuCash did not choke on it and all the data went where I wanted it to go. Then I figured out this bit about what to do with Quicken's classes and that I could run a grep search and then report on the search results. I trust (hope) that I will find a report that meets my needs once I get around to looking into it. If I had to, I could export the information from the search to a spreadsheet, but I would like to avoid that. It seems to me that my financial software should be powerful enough to generate the reports I need on a regular basis.

Best,
John

On Aug 1, 2014, at 3:34 PM, Wm wrote:

> Wed, 30 Jul 2014 14:24:42 <1B4CFE37-DA00-4003-AADA-9B3826465880 at editide.us>  John Morris <johnjeff at editide.us>
> 
> [on reporting views of account structures]
> 
>> This is a good example of why an orthogonal tagging system would be very helpful. Since GnuCash lacks such a system, I have developed my own. I use a pair of slash characters wrapped around my tag in the memo or note field to simulate such a system. For example, I might use /Alpha/ for the Alpha brokerage and /Beta/ for the Beta brokerage. Then, when I want to pull a report by brokerage, I would do a find using GnuCash's grep search capability to define the group of transactions to use. Of course, the alternative account structure suggested originally could be used with tags for each stock: /IBM/ and /Apple/, for example. Fortunately, GnuCash does autofill recent memo and note entries, so I don't have to worry too much about remembering to use the same tag each time.
> 
> I'm intrigued.  What are you using as your base report?  If you have expanded on this previously feel free to point me at a URL
> 
> Do you use a spreadsheet at all for, say, asset allocation on a periodic  basis or have you worked out a way to do it all in GNC ?
> 
> ===
> 
> It occurs to me that something the OP may not know (if he is new to GNC) is that the account structure is largely independent of the atual accounts, so
> 
> assets:inv:A:IBM
> 
> is already a view and
> 
> assets:wot-I-own:IBM
> 
> isn't any different as far as GNC is concerned (presuming broad account types are kept together).