[GNC] recognition of unrealized gains

[Christopher Lam]

You may wish to read Peter Selinger's essay at
https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/gnucash.html

On Thu, 6 Aug 2020, 7:09 am doncram, <doncram at gmail.com> wrote:

> Does GnuCash recognize unrealized gains/losses of investments such as
> stocks, so that they would appear in an Income Statement for a given period
> and in a Balance Sheet for a given date?  And if so, how/where, and can one
> control the presentation?
>
> The online documentation of the Tutorial and Concepts Guide, (at
> www.gnucash.org) doesn't say.  A lot of effort seems to be devoted to the
> good purpose of developing/maintaining the automated updating of prices for
> securities, drawing from the internet.   The Investments Chapter covers
> purchases and sales and other transactions, and in 9.6.5 has an example
> "Assets Over Time" bar chart (found by selecting Reports / Assets &
> Liabilities / Asset Chart, apparently) showing the changing value of an
> investment in Amazon stock, using varying price quotes, so surely an
> updated "most recent" value is available for reporting the value of the
> Amazon investment in the Balance Sheet report for any given date, either in
> total or by basis vs. unrealized gain/loss amounts.  Also the amount of
> unrealized gain/loss achieved for any period could be computed, using the
> price database.  Chapter 11 describes manual updating of asset value for a
> valuable painting by an explicit entry recognizing unrealized gain, but
> this seems not applicable to securities.
>
> Do the B/S and IS reports reflect these?  Sorry for dumb aspect of this
> question, because I should be able to figure that out by testing an
> example.  I am guessing not because it is not described.  If the reports
> automatically do, then the documentation should report that (and I think it
> should be highlighted as a really nice feature of GnuCash not done by, say,
> Quickbooks AFAIK).  If not, can the amounts be reported, so one could at
> least manually record, by journal entry dated December 31, what is
> necessary for the B/S and IS to report correctly in total?  If it is
> automatically done, it seems to me that one would want to designate where
> each stock's unrealized gain/loss should go, e.g. into a general
> "Unrealized Gain/Loss - Taxable" or a "-Non-Taxable" account.  Or for a
> more specific account like "Unrealized Gain/Loss in Education Fund" (to
> relate this to ongoing thread titled "non-currency liabilities").
>
> The not-dumb aspect of this question is to call for a new section in
> Chapter 9 and/or Chapter 11 to cover this topic, for an individual and/or
> for a business, whether the feature is already developed within GnuCash
> 4.0, or not.
> --Don
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