Trading Accounts

[Stefan Söffing]

Hello David, 

I'm using the trading accounts since quite some time now. To be honest, however, I don't exactly recall the reason why - all I remember is the fact that at this time I was not able to get my balance sheet to balance without trading accounts. 

What I like about the concept of trading accounts is the fact that it conserves the money flow at all times: for exchange transactions without trading accounts, some amount of one currency "disappears" while the other currency just "appears out of nothing". With trading accounts it's true double-entry transactions for each currency amount separately. The trading accounts basically represent the "market" you are trading with, as a source or sink for the foreign currency (therefore they are typically excluded from all reports, as they do not represent assets you own) . 
Btw, Peter Selinger's tutorial mostly deals with the accounting principles of trading accounts, so it should still be valid even if GnuCash has evolved since then. It was a tough read for me, but worth the pain. 


GnuCash: When trading accounts are enabled, GnuCash should take care of automatically creating additional splits in all transactions which involve two different currencies (same for stocks). The trading accounts themselves are created automatically upon need. 
In general, the feature is implemented quite transparently, such that the user does not need to deal with the trading accounts manually (there might be a few exceptions to this, e.g. when creating transactions for realized gains / losses - although the lots feature may assist there as well).

Trading accounts are probably best enabled when creating a new GnuCash file. I have no idea how GnuCash handles this if activated on an existing book, especially whether existing trading transactions are converted to use trading accounts. 

Disclaimer: I'm happy to provide any possible input, but please note that I'm just a regular user without any accounting background, my knowledge mostly comes from existing documentation + trial and error... 

Cheers 
- Stefan 


Am 5. Dezember 2016 13:32:11 MEZ, schrieb "David T. via gnucash-user" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>:
>Hello,
>
>Once again, in going over the Multiple Currencies chapter, I came
>across the note that trading accounts can be used for this, with a
>reference to a tutorial by Peter Selinger from around 2010, which
>predates significant development in GnuCash on trading accounts.
>Further searching online shows minimal further information about
>trading accounts as implemented in GnuCash. There is a very sketchy
>wiki page, and a couple of questioning threads from several years back,
>as well as a bugzilla bug (Bug 635386), which is the source of the note
>in the current documentation.
>
>Does anyone have good information about the trading accounts features,
>how they work in GnuCash, and how they can or should be implemented in
>a GnuCash file? I think it would be best to have these features
>explained in the chapter.
>
>Thanks,
>David
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