Hi Martin, thank you very much for your response. Although I'm familiar with the individual terms & concepts (read the vast majority of the project's documentation), I haven't been able to put the pieces of the method you described together. Would you be able to provide a brief example of how it might work?
On Saturday, September 30, 2017 at 3:41:14 AM UTC+3, Martin Blais wrote: > > On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 10:31 AM, <[email protected] <javascript:>> > 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/bbd1dc6f-5618-4ac9-8b20-1eacaf3ff2fb%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
