On Mon, May 03, 2021 at 04:52:04PM -0700, Anatoly Makarevich wrote: > I'm very interested in trying plain text accounting, I currently use > GnuCash, and it's turned into quite the chore now that I've gotten into > stocks and cryptocurrencies... > > I recently moved countries, and expect to possibly move again in the > future. I would like to keep a single accounting history while still being > able to calculate things relative to any "base" currency. This is > especially important because, though I'm living in Europe, I'm a US citizen > and need to file taxes anyways. While my only income was my salary, it was > all easy to do manually, but now I need to calculate capital gains for > stocks and cryptocurrency. > > What really made me look for alternatives to GnuCash was the impossibility > of setting transaction fees with a "stock"-type; since "gas fees" in crypto > are paid in crypto, this means it's a huge headache. > > As I understand from reading threads, Beancount supports 2 different > options for cryptocurrencies. One is to treat crypto like a currency, in > which case all of them are equivalent, but cost accounting is more > difficult in some way? The other is to treat it like an investment asset, > which tracks the price each particular unit was sold... which is confusing > to me, because it seems I can't sell at a different price than the buying > price? That doesn't seem right. > > Essentially, I use USD, EUR, PLN, BYN, 3+ cryptocurrencies, and probably > stocks. In GnuCash I used the trading accounts method to handle all > conversions, and I believe the ledger balance was kept. I can change the > report currency to get "today's" status of all transactions. Can I do the > same easily in Beancount? Judging by what I've seen, the answer is yes. Are > there any hidden dangers or other problems? > > Thank you for your time.
I mostly view my Beancount ledger through the fava web UI, and it seems to have good support for viewing things in different currencies. You should make sure you supply the necessary prices somewhere in your ledger. I don't know if Beancount will do everything you want. Maybe try a couple of experiments with toy examples? I'm not sure what you mean by "I can't sell at a different price than the buying price". You might want to look at the "Trading with Beancount" document at https://beancount.github.io/docs/trading_with_beancount.html . (Maybe you're referring to the fact that when you sell a lot, it's valued at the price you bought it at? Hopefully the examples on that page will explain why that works.) -- James -- 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/20210505195908.bsx3tfa7qzhwx2ow%40moth.falsifian.org.
