Hello! I have a scary accounting question for Halloween...
I have 8 years of GnuCash data I'd like to convert to beancount. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, GnuCash doesn't track cost basis for trades. Because of that, I'm having difficulty replicating the suggested approach from https://beancount.github.io/docs/trading_with_beancount.html. I am using https://github.com/falsifian/gnucash-to-beancount and can 'successfully' convert my data to beancount, but instead of specifying the cost basis, purchases of investments end up looking like: 2014-10-31 * "BUY 1 SPY @ 200" Assets:Current-Assets:Brokerage:SPY 1 SPY @ 200 USD Assets:Trading:CURRENCY:USD 200 USD Assets:Current-Assets:Brokerage -200 USD Assets:Trading:NYSE:SPY -1 SPY @ 200 USD Sales are in essentially the same form, just in reverse. In this way, my Assets:Trading:CURRENCY:USD account ends up being a weird combination of the total cost basis of all my current investments and the gains or losses from previous investments. Obviously I have enough data here to calculate the cost basis for *purchases* of investments, so that ought to be do-able with some modification of the gnucash-to-beancount scripts, but I'm not sure how best to handle the sales. I've been reading the beancount documentation and have found the "FIFO" booking method - is that pretty much my only option at this point? Are there any gotchas to using it in my case? As a bonus - if I end up using the "FIFO" booking method, is it possible to get beancount re-write my .beancount file with the cost basis it calculated internally for the sales? My goal there would be to make the implicit cost basis on sales explicit - and allow me to use STRICT moving forward without having to manually fix up 8 years of transactions. Thanks for any pointers! -Aaron -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/01dd4feb-9b9a-423b-bbee-d7a9d2613035n%40googlegroups.com.
