Trading Accounts

[Mike Alexander]

> On Dec 5, 2016, at 10:46 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Dec 5, 2016, at 4:32 AM, David T. via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> IIRC Mike Alexander developed the trading accounts feature based on the instructions in the Selinger article and regards it as the documentation. One "implements" trading accounts by enabling them in File>Properties and GnuCash then creates the trading splits when balancing a transaction being edited. If you search site:lists.gnucash.org <http://lists.gnucash.org/> and bugzilla for 

This is correct.  John implies that you have to manually create the trading splits (I suspect it’s just a typo), but this is not true, of course.  When they are enabled GnuCash will create them when necessary or when you scrub a transaction or account.

I would be glad to help you write better documentation for this feature.  Peter Selinger’s article is still the best description of what I was trying to implement.  There are a few differences, mainly because GnuCash only allows one commodity per split and his examples use multiple commodities per split.  I would suggest that you try to find previous discussion of this as John suggests and then ask questions about things you don’t understand.

          Mike