[GNC] Tracking Currency Transaction Gains

afora afora at 377827.org
Tue May 12 04:59:09 EDT 2020


As of mid 2020, Stefan's option 2 is still the only way to go. It achieves
what is required by the OP, and given where gnucash is right now, is
probably the only way to go for a foreseeable future.

Just a note to developers who have done an absolutely amazing job pulling
together this project. Your efforts are fantastic, you just need somebody
who business advisory services to indicate which options and interfaces are
industry standard at present. Accounting for FX is one problematic area
where an industry partnership would be very beneficial to the development
team. Right now it feels a bit too raw despite 10+ years of development.
It's not to blame the developers, but rather a major improvement point for
those who drive the roadmap and interface with the accounting profession.
Peter Selinger is a good starting point, but he's not an accountant and
hence he does not understand UI choices which are out there in the business
world. You really need industry experience.

In any case, after spending a few days playing around with the system here's
my 2c on the current shape of gnucash:

- absolutely fine for keeping personal income/expenditure books
- fine (although slightly cumbersome) for basic investment portfolio
management
- lacking for more sophisticated financial instrument including FX, futures,
options etc (I spent a serious effort hacking it as required functionality
is not present out of the box).
- inappropriate for any institutional investments management. It is simply
too cumbersome, too limited or non existing options for complex instruments,
no productivity/interfacing considerations for an investment business 
- lacking but doable for small businesses as long as there's no FX or other
complex accounting entries
- inappropriate for either SME with FX or complex accounting entries, or
anything with more than 1 person at the helm.

Alternatives:
- proprietary investment portfolio applications (cost may be justified if
your focus is productivity + reporting functions)
- proprietary accounting software such as Sage (but stay away from cloud
implementations (MYOB, Xero etc as you will not own data)
- open source ERM systems such as Tryton (but still very raw and I would
personally not recommend touching it directly unless you have a dev team)

My personal choice:
- gnucash is fine for keeping track of my investments (although I wasted a
lot of effort hacking it)
- Sage as a SME platform (my time is the most dear resource and I'm happy
supporting a commercial solution which delivers on productivity and support)
- running it under a Windows VM.

Again thank you for a fantastic open-source personal finance management
solution!
Happy hacking!

--------------------------------
Although not strictly foreseen by the documentation, it is in fact
possible to have the realized gain/loss transaction separate. The method
to create that transaction is in fact very similar to the above: Start
entering a new transaction for the realized gain/loss, choose the
Income:Gain or Expense:Loss account. Then in *expanded* (transaction
journal) mode enter the gain/loss in the income/expense split (*). The
Edit Exchange Rate dialog comes up, choose "To Amount" = 0. Enter.
Gnucash will automatically create the transaction into the trading
account and the result is exactly what Peter Selinger recommends for
this purpose.

(*) Note: It is important not to enter the amount in the collapsed
(single-line) view, as that would be interpreted as foreign currency
(EUR) amount, but we want this part to be empty in the end: The final
transaction shall have an empty row for the foreign currency (EUR)
account - this is good since it makes the transaction show up in the EUR
account (together with the corresponding 'sell' txn). If this behavior
is not wanted, just remove the empty EUR account split line from the
transaction, then the gain/loss is visible only in the corresponding
Income/Expense account. 




--
Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list