[GNC] Accounting for gold coins

[Gary Holtum]

Adrien,

I guess I am missing the point here. I can't enter a simple transaction for buying gold coins. I know the quantity and the total cost. I cr cash and dr gold acct. I get imbalance. I don't understand need for "Trading Acct" on. I tried "buy" gold and "sell" cash but got imbalance errors.

Presently. I have an acct, gold, that has a balance representing the total of three purchases at different unit costs. I would like to be able to see the current increase or decrease in value of the total based on market fluctuations.

I set up a new currency account  using XAU but I can't enter the transactions without errors. I am doing something wrong!

A detailed walk through of a transaction would be very helpful.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: gnucash-user [mailto:gnucash-user-bounces+diamondhranchqh=earthlink.net at gnucash.org] On Behalf Of Adrien Monteleone
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2019 7:46 PM
To: gnucash-user
Subject: Re: [GNC] Accounting for gold coins

Since XAU and XAG are one-ounce quotes, I simply enter them as their own currency unit.

So if I buy a 10oz. bar of silver, I’d enter it in the XAG account as 10.00. (because I have trading accounts turned on, GnuCash will create the USD equivalent splits for me and auto-balance them)

If I buy a $10 face-value roll of 90% half-dollars, I’d enter them as (99/256)*20. (and let GnuCash do the math) [99/256 is the reduced fraction of 185-10/16 grains, which is the legal amount of pure silver in the coin, and the 480 grains to the Troy ounce.]

Of course a one-ounce coin or ingot would just be 1.00.

If you purchased in gram increments, you’d have to convert to ounces first as that is the basis for the price quote. (roughly 31.1 grams to the Troy ounce if I recall correctly, but you’ll likely need more significant digits than that)

You don’t have to use the price quote feature. You can just denominate them in your home currency and do the math outside of GnuCash.

I don’t think you can define your own currency, but I seem to recall this being discussed on the list or in a bug report somewhere. Otherwise, you could create a gold-gram currency for example, and then either set up your own quote source, or possibly create a fixed exchange rate to XAU and when that updates, your custom gold-gram would update. But I really don’t think that ability has been implemented.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Feb 26, 2019, at 3:47 PM, Gary Holtum <diamondhranchqh at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> Adrian - How do you enter them in ounces?
> 
> Gary
> 


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