[GNC] Representing stock grants/opening balances in GnuCash

[D.]

Michael, 

I have only done this once long ago, and my experience is/was that, ultimately, it all ends up as a currency-valued transaction, so it makes sense to treat the vesting process as a transfer of cash that is converted into the stock. If you are in the US,  you will discover that the IRS wants to know the value of that stock you were granted-- and when you sell that stock, they want to know what the original value was (and therefore how much gain you realized). So, I handled it as a standard stock purchase, with the money for the purchase coming from an income account. 

But that is probably wrong, since I Am Not An Accountant,  and someone will show me the error in my ways. 

Best, 
David T.


-------- Original Message --------
From: Michal Pokorny <agentydragon at gmail.com>
Sent: Tue Mar 23 15:15:59 EDT 2021
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: [GNC] Representing stock grants/opening balances in GnuCash

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
_______________________________________________
gnucash-user mailing list
gnucash-user at gnucash.org
To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe:
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information.
-----
Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.