Chapter 8 - investment accounts

[Jamestk]

David, no apology necessary, pinch of salt.

Just to recap -

- A manual calculation is needed to enter a profit or loss

- This leads to two register entries, one for the selling of shares and the
second to record gain/loss

I thought one way around this would be for the gross purchase to appear as
an expense with gross sale as income, would this work on a profit and loss
report?

Investment accounts do not seem to be selected in the default settings (P+F
report), I tried manually clicking on brokerage accounts + sub accounts but
again, nothing within range.

Is it just the categories that appear in reports as opposed to accounts?  

Just a thought, although I don't want to waste forum members time on a
fruitless exercise.

Thanks,

David

______________________________

James, 

I have to apologize for Wm's behavior on this mail list last night.  I 
am not sure why he has not been banned. 

You are close to being correct. 
Actually, the second entry in the stock account is the difference 
between the amount originally paid for the shares that were just sold in 
the example and the amount received from the sale.  That is hopefully a 
profit and it also needs to be recorded as an income that is called a 
capital gain.  There is no need to use the word "offset".  it is pure 
income.  The only difference is that you got it by selling stock instead 
of by working in a coal mine, so you put it into a different income 
account. 

Properly recording the capital gain balances the additional currency 
asset in the system with income, so that now the Trial Balance report 
results in a zero balance.  That is the double entry part. 

Also, you are correct about the fact that there are two entries in the 
security account which is incorrectly shown by GnuCash as two 
transactions in the register view because of the code that is used to 
generate register views.  That is a known flaw that has been present for 
many years.  It will not be corrected until the register display code is 
rewritten.  There are other reasons to rewrite the register display code 
and some critical technical reasons that it has been postponed until 
after certain other infrastructure code rewrites are complete.  There 
are only so many developer hours in a year. 

David C 



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