On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 10:31 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > First of all, thank you for this excellent project. >
Thanks John. I have a retirement account to which my company and myself contribute with > every paycheck. There is little control over investments in this account. > One can choose a generic asset allocation from a pre-defined list, and > contributions are automatically invested. There are no shares or prices, > only a balance that fluctuates due to contributions and investment profit > and loss. > > Due to the lack of transparency in this account I'm not quite sure how to > track it. A naive way might be to track the balance of the account using > its base currency, adjusting the balance according to periodic statements: > > 2017-01-01 open Assets:Bank:Checking USD > 2017-01-01 open Assets:Bank:IRA USD > 2017-01-01 open Income:Bank:IRA:PnL USD > 2017-01-01 open Income:Company:Salary USD > 2017-01-01 open Income:Company:IRA USD > > 2017-01-01 * "Payroll" > Assets:Bank:Checking 900.00 USD > Income:Company:Salary -900.00 USD > Assets:Bank:IRA 100.00 USD > Income:Company:IRA -100.00 USD > > ; Adjust IRA balance according to quarterly statement > 2017-03-31 pad Assets:Bank:IRA Income:Bank:IRA:PnL > 2017-04-01 balance Assets:Bank:IRA 110.00 USD > > As far as I can tell this method would be sufficient for my current needs > (tracking the account's balance, profit and loss). However, I wonder if > there's a better way to track this sort of account? > I wouldn't do it this way, as this realizes the P/L. I think the way I'd handle this situation is by using a fake commodity for shares. In order to compute the price of this synthetic commodity, I'd just work back the price of this commodity by looking at your reported account balance against how much cash you put in it (the cost basis). At any point in time, Beancount allows you to compute the cost basis and the broker provides the current market value. The price of those "shares", at that time, is market value / cost basis, and you would input that in when you want data points. When you make a contribution, ideally you would compute the price at that point in time and divide the cash by that price, in order to adjust the number of shares. It's a little bit backwards, but at least it would allow you to compute returns. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAK21%2BhMZBYDKe5aNRTh1ueN6ttvwtvFvCPx35XDLG3cAcXSyiQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
