[GNC] New user account setup question

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 12/29/2020 2:17 PM, Charles Hudson wrote:
> First post: Greetings to all and thanks for your help.  Because I have
> never used GNUCASH before, am unfamiliar with its reporting capabilities
> and am only conversant with basic accounting principles, I have a couple of
> questions about how to set up the chart of accounts.  Briefly:
>
> I want to track investments with some granularity.  For example, if I buy
> the same stock more than once - at different times and perhaps at different
> prices - I will need to account for these differences when I sell.  So it
> seems to me that the hierarchy under Assets would be:
>
> Investments (placeholder)
>       > Brokerage firm account (placeholder)
>               > Stocks (placeholder)
>                       > Individual security, e.g. "XOM" (also a placeholder)
>                                 > Group or "lot" of stocks against which
> transactions are recorded
>
> So if I buy XOM at 50 in March and XOM at 60 in August and sell both lots
> at 70 in October I have two lots, one with a short term capital gain of 10
> per share and one with long-term capital gain of 20 per share.
>
> Does this make sense or am I looking at it wrong?

You are looking at it the right way. That's more or less how I set it up 
for "inventory lots" dealing with tee shirts sold by a non-profit but 
not all lots at exactly the same cost. In that case, I was using FIFO 
for the "cost of goods sold" part of tee shirt sales.

Michael D Novack