[GNC] Representing stock grants/opening balances in GnuCash

Michal Pokorny agentydragon at gmail.com
Tue Mar 23 15:15:59 EDT 2021


Hi!
My employer has a stock grant program. Every ~3 months, some of the stock
vests and I get it in a broker account.

I think the most natural way to describe this would be to have an income
account denominated in the stock, and when some stock vests, doing a
transfer from it with the right number of stocks into my broker account.
Unfortunately it looks like you can't create an income account denominated
in a security. The UI only allowed me to select currencies.

I've looked a bit into the GnuCash guide explanation of stocks. That went
only over inserting actual transactions exchanging money for stock, and
didn't mention any way to "materialize stocks without money"

So, what I think I'll do for the time being is when my stock vests, I look
up the daily price, and create a transaction transferring the right number
of stock from an income account denominated in USD into my broker account,
at the daily rate. That works, but I sort of don't like that it doesn't
really represent reality, in that the income I received were the stocks
themselves - not money that I converted into stocks.

I don't like the same thing about representing my opening balance. My stock
history goes back a long time, so now that I'm trying out GnuCash, I want
to start the books from the start of 2021. Again, it looks like the only
way I can create the opening balance on my stock accounts is by taking the
daily price at 2021-01-01, and transferring from Equity:Opening
Balances:USD into stock accounts, with the proper amount.

Is there some basic reason why income accounts cannot be denominated as a
security? Does anyone have any other way to represent these stock
transactions which are not "really" either buys or sells (like stock grants
/ opening balances), or does everyone just do it this way (by "pretending
those are buys/sells")? Maybe there's some reason why doing it the way I'd
imagine would be broken?

Thanks for any thoughts :)

-- Rai


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