Serious Investment Management with Gnucash

[Alton Brantley]

You are correct.
In my structure, where I listed an "OpenPosition 1”, that item is replicated for each security or mutual fund that you have an open position in.
So, my structure looks like this:
—1.Stocks (Asset-Placeholder)
——Apple Corp (Stock) 		-repeated for each stock with open position
——Cisco Corp (Stock)
——Oracle Corp(Stock)
—2.Fixed Income (Asset-Placeholder)
——OpenPosition 1(Asset type)
—3.Options (Asset-Placeholder)
——OpenPosition1(Asset type)
—4.OtherInvestments (Asset-Placeholder)
——OpenPosition1 (Asset type)

and, similarly under the categorized Income-Dividends, Income-Interest,  and Capital Gains and NonTaxableIncome and NonTaxableCapitalGains
While you could create an expense account for the commissions, you reverse those out when you close a position by reducing the capital gains by the commissions.
By making the Commissions a prepaid expense asset, I can group it in my overall Investment structure, rather than as a distinct expense somewhere else.

My structure has the multiple different accounts, but I have grouped them for efficient access and automatic completion when I’m entering the data.

by typing “1.:1:A” I quickly get to Investment account 1:1.Stocks:Apple”
or by typing “Div:1.:A” I get through autocompletion “Dividends:1.Account name 1:Apple” which is the income account for Apple.

At the end of the calendar year, Dividends:1.Accountname 1:Apple” has all the dividends in Accountname 1 from Apple, which I can verify with my broker’s year-end summare

> On Apr 20, 2017, at 11:21 PM, Andrew Gross <aegross at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 1:46 PM, Alton Brantley <alton.brantley at gmail.com <mailto:alton.brantley at gmail.com>> wrote:
> I manage about 10 investment accounts with 5-6 figure balances. I
> 
> So I have a very fundamental misunderstanding.   My reading of file://localhost/Applications/Gnucash/Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/Gnucash%20Guide/invest_accounts1.html is that I am supposed to setup multiple accounts for each stock/instrument I own.  Each issue should have its own gains, dividend, and expense account....
> 
> Regards,
> Andrew Gross
> 
>