[GNC] Help Selling & Buying Securities

[Eric Coates]

Jack

I'm assuming that your "Invest Account - ABC" is set up as a stock 
(check using the Edit Account button) and you have set an opening 
balance of 100 shares of ABC in that account. If that is correct you 
sell them by an entry similar to the one shown in the attached Sell 
Shares png but you would show that the cash is paid into your Parent 
Invest Account (which should be set up as type Asset but with Security 
/currency set as your base currency.)

After setting up an account "Invest Account - XYZ" buying the XYZ shares 
can be recorded using an entry similar to that shown in the Buy Shares 
png again using the Parent Invest Account as the source of funds. (I'm 
pretty sure that people cleverer than I would do the sale and purchase 
as one transaction but I prefer to keep things simple. Like what I am!)

However, it seems that a more common hierarchy of accounts would be 
something like that shown in the Accounts png. Under Assets set up an 
account (commonly) called after the broker you use - marking it as a 
place holder. Then under that set up separate accounts for cash  and 
each of the shares you have (See the notes above as to Type etc). If, at 
some future point, you want to buy shares using "new money" do a 
Transfer from (typically) your bank account to the Cash sub account; 
similarly, selling shares and withdrawing the money is done by a 
transfer from Cash to the bank account.

There's a good write up of the procedure available at
https://code.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/invest-buy-stock1.html
which also deals with commission and taxes. It must be good, it set me 
right!

Best wishes
Eric

=======================
On 10/08/2021 01:34, Jack Frillman via gnucash-user wrote:
> I'm clueless on how to sell a security and use that money to buy 
> another security. All I have done to date is reinvest interest & 
> dividends.
>
> I have an account structure that looks like this.
>
> Parent Invest Account - This is for holding a cash balance.
>    ABC - Invest account for ABC security.
>    XYZ - Invest account for XYZ security.
>    xxx - Many more investment accounts for xxx securities.
>
> I'm selling all 100 shares of the security ABC.
> I'm going to buy 50 shares of the security XYZ.
> How should I do this?
>
> I tried to transfer the cash from the selling of ABC to the Parent 
> Investment Account then transfer the required amount of cash from the 
> Parent Investment Account to XYZ account then buy those XYZ shares.  
> But I got so confused I didn't know what was going on and deleted 
> everything and started over trying it with a split transaction and OMG 
> that was even worse.
>
> Please advise.
> Thanks.
>

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