It's been rumoured that Matt Sisk said:
> For the sake of clarity, let's assume a single, symmetric stock
> transaction. You buy X number of shares, and at some later date you sell
> X number of shares.
as far as gnucash is concerned, this is *two* transactions.
A transaction is 'atomic', i.e. is indivisible, and always has a value
of zero: thus:
jaunuary 23 12:05:43 (gnucash actually records nanoseconds)
-$1000 (withdraw from bank abc)
+$1000 (buy 100 shares at $10/share, deposit into brokerage def)
(gnucash records both price & amt)
------
$0.0000
the above is considered to be a single transaction, with two 'entries'
in it (the withdraw from bank ABC, and the deposit into stock acct DEF)
What may or may not happen at a later date is *entirely* independent of
what happened in that 'nanosecond'. Its also independent of tax laws,
accounting practices, etc. Its simply a record, an unarguable 'fact'.
> the number of shares do not fluctuate minute by minute, the nevertheless
> possibly fluctuate due to splits/joins.
This should get stored as follows:
april 23 12:05:43
-$5000 (withdraw 100 shares at $50/shr from broker DEF)
+$5000 (deposit 200 shares at $25/shr at brokerage DEF)
(gnucash records both price & amt)
------
$0.0000
This transaction, just like the last one, happened 'instantly'.
The value of your brokerage account did not change.
(Right now, the stock register does not display this correctly;
that's the bug that started this whole thread)
===========================================================
> So, okay, partly I was not aware that the accounting engine was so
> intimately involved with "event logging" as well as actual transfer of
> value between accounts.
what you cal an 'event' is what we call a 'transaction'. It always
happens 'instantly', without time delay, so we don't have to think
of things like interest rates, etc. It's value is always zero (as shown
above), thus gaurenteeing that everything balances. It usually has a
pair of matching 'entries' (a deposit & a withdrawl), although it can
have three or more, as long as the sum of all three is zero. Each entry
points to one-and-only-one account (so that each withdrawl/deposit is
'from somewhere' or 'to somehwere'.) And theres room for a 'description'
and a 'memo'. And thats it. Thats all that a transaction is.
It must necessarily be simple; if its complex, then its unauditable,
unverifieable, etc. simple == good.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Under the covers, transactions are all that there is. Everything else
is 'just' GUI or 'just' a report. We generate guis & reports on the
fly. But the actual financial data, the records that must never be lost
or mangled or accidentaly mashed, are the 'transactions'; they're
what's permanent.
> For my own purposes, I would eventually like to see VPS abilities built
what's VPS?
--linas
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