[GNC] Why does the sample "investments" account tree have intermediate "Bond", "Mutual Fund", and "Stock" accounts?

[devaps at asia.com]

Jim,

The default account hierarchy that’s provided when you choose investment accounts is just that. You can choose to have it per your tracking requirements. 

Like you, my parent brokerage account is a placeholder and I have a $Cash account under that which acts as a staging account for buys and sells. The default hierarchy is giving you all possible types of investments one usually has in a brokerage account. So my modified hierarchy looks like this -

Assets
..Investments
….Brokerage account
…..Stock
…...$Cash
…….ISIN 1
…….ISIN 2  and so on
….Mutual Fund
……Fund 1
……Fund 2 and so on

ETFs are technically mutual funds, but since they trade like stocks, I track them under stocks instead of mutual funds. From what I can tell, there’s no difference between account type stock and mutual fund. Perhaps they exist as two separate types to allow for different treatment in the future, if need arises. 

If you have bonds as well as stocks in your brokerage account, then you can move $Cash under brokerage account. 

I don’t invest in mutual funds through my brokerage account. I keep that just for stocks and ETFs. My mutual fund investments are done directly with the fund companies, so the structure I have makes the selection of accounts in report options easier. I can just select the parent placeholder Mutual Fund and say select all children to run a report on just mutual funds. 

So yes, there’s no harm in having AMZN directly under brokerage and use a $Cash account for staging purposes. I also don’t like to include transactions in parent accounts, so they are all placeholders for me like you described. This works well for me. 

Cheers,
Deva

<====================================>

From: Jim DeLaHunt <list+gnucash at jdlh.com>
To: Gnucash Users <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: [GNC] Why does the sample "investments" account tree have
	intermediate "Bond", "Mutual Fund", and "Stock" accounts?
Message-ID: <009a32e9-b8bd-1547-cbec-0320661f1c10 at jdlh.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

Hello, folks:

I have been using GnuCash for a long time, starting with the GnuCash 
template account tree and modifying it gradually, but never thinking 
hard about it. Until now. I am adding a bunch of investment accounts. 
This makes me look more closely at the template account structure 
depicted in 
<https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-guide/invest-setup1.html>.

This structure is:

  * Assets
      o Investments
          + Brokerage account
              # Bond
              # Mutual Fund
              # Stock
                  * AMZN

What is the reason for the template inserting the layer of subaccounts 
between "Brokerage account" and "AMZN" (for Amazon.com stock)? Why 
shouldn't the child accounts denominated in each security be directly 
under the "Brokerage account" account (as long as the parent account is 
denominated in the currency which the securities are priced in)?

For my own purposes, it seems simpler to me to have the per-security 
child accounts be directly under the "Brokerage account". Is there a 
rationale for the intermediate accounts which I am missing?

Also, in the template, the "Brokerage account" is of type "Bank", and is 
not a placeholder. That seems to imply that cash and cash-equivalent 
transactions should be applied directly to "Brokerage account". Somehow 
I ended up making a child account "Cash CAD" (or "Cash USD", or 
whichever), and applying all the cash-equivalent transactiosn there. My 
equivalent of "Brokerage account" has no transactions, and is often a 
placeholder account, and has account type "Asset" rather than "Bank".?? 
Is there a reason to put the cash transactions directly in the brokerage 
account, or is this a matter of personal preference? (In which case, I 
will keep the structure I have.)

Thank you in advance for your insight,
 ???? ?Jim DeLaHunt