Reconciling trading accounts to show unrealized gains at year end

[Gaute Ellingsen]

Thanks for the reply, Mike. I think you're right that it might be difficult
to use trading accounts for what I aim to do. I really like how trading
accounts will give me a mark-to-market snapshot at any point of time, but
for regulatory reasons I also need to close the books annually and
explicitly state both realized and unrealized gains on the P&L. Trading
accounts will give me all the information I need: as you point out the
balance sheet will show the market value, and the net trading account will
equal my unrealized gains. What I would need in addition is a way to net
out the trading account (debit trading acct, credit 'unrealized gains') at
year end while also displaying the stock portfolio at cost on the balance
sheet. As far as I can tell, that's not possible, so I might need to redo
the accounts without trading accounts. That's a shame, as I'm sure I'm not
the only one who would like to use trading accounts but also close the
books at year end.



On 4 January 2017 at 07:41, Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu> wrote:

> See below.
>
> > On Dec 31, 2016, at 2:27 AM, peripatetic <gaute.ellingsen at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I note that when using trading accounts, my balance sheet will display
> the
> > portfolio at market value. However, I would prefer separating out the
> > unrealized gains also on the balance sheet.
>
> I don’t think this has anything to do with trading accounts.  The balance
> sheet will get the value of the stock from the price data base using the
> mechanism (latest, nearest in time, etc.) that you specify in the report
> options.
>
> > Previously I have simply done the calculations manually, but it would be
> > great if there was a more elegant way of going about this using GNUCash's
> > trading accounts.
>
> I don’t think trading accounts are the way to do this, but I’m not sure
> how it should be done.
>
>            Mike
>