[GNC] Tracking cash flows with balanced transactions

peterb peterb at gmail.com
Thu Aug 20 00:01:28 EDT 2020


Let's say I have a security - could be a stock, or a bond - which
periodically yields some dividend or interest.  Often it's convenient to be
able to see those dividends in a single register.

The vanilla way to account for dividends or interest doesn't quite make
this easy: the obvious way to do it will appear in your brokerage register,
but not in the register for the stock.  And that makes perfect sense - the
money isn't going in to your stock account!

Description          Account          Debit      Credit
Dividend BIGCO     Assets:Brokerage   50
                   Income:Dividend               50

If you're disciplined about your descriptions you can of course search for
these, but it feels potentially error prone when looking for them.

I'm on record as not liking the way GnuCash handles realized income/loss
from sales in stock accounts (putting "zero share" dollar values in the
share-denominated register instead of explicitly treating stock sales as
return-of-capital plus gain/loss) but it occurs to me that you can do
something similar for dividends and interest:

Description          Account                  Debit      Credit
Dividend BIGCO     Assets:Brokerage:BIGCO     50
                   Assets:Brokerage           50
                   Income:Dividend                       50
                   Assets:Brokerage:BIGCO                50

The idea here being: the income flows into the BIGCO-denominated account,
but immediately flows out again into the cash-denominated account; if one
looks at the BIGCO register, all of the dividend events will be clearly
visible.

Does anyone have either a more elegant way of accomplishing the goal of
"all cash flows from a stock are visible on the stock's register", or a
good reason *not* to do what I'm giving an example of here?
 (Alternatively, if this is in fact what everyone does as described in
chapter 7853.633 of the user guide, and I just missed it, please let me
know!)

Thanks!

-Peter


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