Gold as Commodity?

[GWB]

Lane,

What John describes does come very close to tracking the value of
physical gold in gnucash, which is actually quite impressive for an
open source project dedicated to the main features of gnucash.  If you
follow the instructions at:

http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.6/C/gnucash-guide/invest-stockprice1.html#invest-stockprice-auto2

you can have gnucash retrieve quotes from a number of exchanges.
After setting this up on ubuntu, I can see the following:

$ sudo ./gnc-fq-dump

Usage: ./gnc-fq-dump <quote-source> [-v] <stock> [<stock> ...]

Available sources are:
     australia amfiindia asia fool adig yahoo hustock yahoo_brasil...

and many other quote sources.  So it can work, but it takes some
effort to set it up.

I don't know how each jurisdiction handles these things, but I don't
doubt that Michael has it right that in most, if not all of them,
books kept in more than one currency would create a number of problems
(though I do like the old stone currency system in Yap; not entirely
immune to inflation, but very low rate of theft).  So gnucash can do
this, but you should give some consideration as to how you are going
to treat gold for accounting and tax purposes.  If it is an asset,
then you may have to account for it on "cost basis", that is,
appreciation or depreciation from time acquired until time disposed.
If you're in the US, that means figuring out long term and short term
gains and losses.  If you're in a commonwealth country like Canada or
a possession of the UK, then you probably have a more rationale system
than the U.S.

Currencies are treated differently in the U.S. than assets,
commodities, and equities.  In the simplest scenario, they are just
that, currencies, regardless of appreciation or depreciation against
other currencies (USD, CAD, etc.).  But the rules may have changed,
and not for the better.  Forex contracts with a "collar" are more
complicated, but still treated differently than capital gains and
losses.

But I don't know enough to give advice on this, and I'm not qualified
to do so, as an accountant or tax lawyer would be.  So perhaps you
could get gnucash working with quotes as John describes, and then
figure out the reporting aspects later.

Gordon

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 5:16 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>
>> On Jan 26, 2017, at 7:18 AM, Lane Lester <lane.lester at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 10:45 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>> If you want to use the XAU currency for Gold then the account must be of type Asset or Bank.
>>
>> I tried setting up an Asset account that way with "XAU (Gold)" as the Security/currency. When I entered the transactions, I put the weight of gold in the Increase column. I clicked to save the transaction, and a new window came up: Transfer Funds. Everything was filled out, but I had to choose Currency Transfer as either Exchange Rate or To Amount. I had to choose the latter to get the purchase amount charged to my credit card account.
>>
>> Somehow the correct amount got charged to my card, even though the price of gold has changed since I made the purchase. The gold account register doesn't show any dollar amounts, only weights.
>>
>> It seems there's no way to track the value of the physical gold in GnuCash. It's not a bit deal; I just wanted to see if it's possible.
>>
>
> Please remember to copy the list on all replies.
>
> You can retrieve prices for XAU with Finance::Quote. See http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.6/C/gnucash-guide/invest-stockprice1.html#invest-stockprice-auto2 for instructions on setting it up. Now wether those are useful prices is another matter entirely, and you might prefer to get prices from another source and enter them manually. Instructions for that are in the preceding section.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
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