handling multiple entities in single book : issue with trading accounts

[John Ralls]

> On Jan 12, 2015, at 9:34 PM, Sébastien de Menten <sdementen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I am handling in a single book all accounts and transactions of my couple,
> essentially, myself, my wife and a "common" assets (whatever we put in
> common).
> I have created a typical account structure for each of the 3 "persons"
> adding the name of the person just before the 1st level, i.e.:
> 
> Assets / My wife / Current Assets / Checking Account
> Assets / Me / Current Assets / Checking Account
> Assets / Common / Current Assets / Checking Account
> 
> and this for all accounts (equity, expenses, etc).
> 
> I can then  see the balance per person as well as the overall flow from my
> wife and myself to the "common" part as well as double check transfers
> between our accounts => any better ideas (than creating different books) to
> handle this ?
> 
> However, once I use the "trading accounts" options, gnucash creates
> accounts like
> 
> Trading / CURRENCY / EUR
> Trading / PCX / DIA
> 
> whereas i would like
> 
> Trading / Me / CURRENCY / EUR
> Trading / Me / PCX / DIA
> Trading / My wife / CURRENCY / EUR
> Trading / Common / CURRENCY / EUR
> 
> to avoid mixing unrealized P&Ls. Any way to tell gnucash to do that (e.g.
> assign manually a trading account per STOCK account) ?

No, the trading accounts are hard-coded.

The trading accounts aren't for P&L, they're just to separate out the exchange part of a multi-currency or multi-commodity transaction. You should create separate splits between the(e.g.) stock account and an income account to account for realized gains. Note that this can be a bit tricky if there are more than 2 commodities/currencies involved, like if you were to trade stocks in USD. See the discussion in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=742795.

The name "Trading Account" was taken from a blog article about using GnuCash in a multi-currency environment, but the name seems to confuse people who haven't read the article. Perhaps we should change it to something like "Exchange Rate Account" to be more clear to them.

Regards,
John Ralls