Serious Investment management in GC ?

[David T.]

Andrew,

I am in the same situation as you; I am the "family accountant" as well, tracking both my and my wife’s various accounts. It is rather complex, with each of us having an investment account, four different retirement accounts each (2 pension plans and Regular and Roth IRAs), a couple of jointly-held investment accounts, and two different 529 accounts for our kids. 

I, too, went that separate account route for a long while—separate income and gains accounts, at least. I finally decided that this was overkill, since my tax reporting was on the brokerage account. I have since modified my income account structures so that they match my tax reporting needs, like so:

Income
- Dividend Income
- - Taxable
- - - My Brokerage Dividends
- - - Spouse Brokerage Dividends
- - - Joint Dividends
- - Untaxed
- - - My Accounts
- - - - My Reg IRA Dividends
- - - - My Roth IRA Dividends
- - - - My Pension Dividends
- - - Spouse Accounts
- - - - Spouse Reg IRA Dividends
- - - - Spouse Roth IRA Dividends
- - - - Spouse Pension Dividends

So, you see, the account structure is greatly simplified. When I enter dividend transactions, I open the base brokerage account (in which all cash transactions end up), and enter a simple description with the ticker symbol (“MSFT Dividend”). This both speeds up entry and clearly identifies the source of the dividend (which can be leveraged by the new transaction report that’s rattling around the list). 

Gains are more complicated, since I have to report short term and long term capital gains on the taxable accounts. The gains account structure looks just like the Dividend tree, except that each of the above accounts has a pair of sub-accounts, one for ST and one for LT gains. For the untaxed accounts, I simply have two generic accounts for ST and LT gains, since I don’t care about breaking out that detail.

I realize this is still quite complicated in appearance, but in practice, it works pretty well, and I am able to match my accounts with the brokerage tax forms pretty quickly each year.

HTH,
David


> On Apr 21, 2017, at 8:17 AM, Andrew Gross <aegross at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 3:01 PM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com <mailto:sunfish62 at yahoo.com>> wrote:
> Perhaps you have something particular in mind?
> 
> The thing that concerns me is that every stock is supposed to have its own set of account.  That could be hundreds of accounts. I manage my own portfolio plus another family member.  The thought of having multiple accounts for each stock (acct needed for capital gains, dividends, and an expense account -- 3 accounts per stock -- per my understanding of file://localhost/Applications/Gnucash/Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/Gnucash%20Guide/invest_accounts1.html) I find mind-boggling and I have to question whether it makes more sense to get something like MoneyDance or iBank that can automate most of this. 
> 
> Andrew Gross
>