[GNC] Capital Gains

[David Cousens]

gnuGord, David,

There is nothing in accounting practice per se to stop you tracking
unrealized gains or losses for your own purposes, e.g. management of your
assets. 

It is just that they are not usually recognized for purposes like taxation
and financial reporting as income or expenses for a business until they have
actually been incurred, usually on the sale of the asset/stock
involved.There are some cases in some jurisdictions where they are recorded
for financial reporting in addition to realized gains and losses but this is
not common. Capital gains taxes do not normally apply to unrealized gains or
losses. The rules on this vary between jurisdictions and this is a case
where local professioanl accounting advice is needed. 

If you are going to track them, you would normally do so against a
sub-account of Equity labelled as "Unrealized Gains or Losses" (which may or
may not in turn have sub-accounts for specific assets or asset classes
depending on the detail you require). It would be also a good practice to
have a sub-account totalling into the asset account for the particular asset
to record unrealized gains and losses so that you can easily differentiate
realized gains and losses from unrealized gains and losses in your accounts
where you are using them to formulate input for taxation and financial
reporting . 

The sale transaction which zeros the asset value and debits your bank or
brokerage account then includes two additional splits which zero out  the
unrealized gains and losses balances in the asset sub account and the
Unrealized Gains and Losses account(s) in Equity.

David Cousens



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David Cousens
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