As of mid 2020, Stefan's option 2 is still the only way to go. It achieves what is required by the OP, and given where gnucash is right now, is probably the only way to go for a foreseeable future.
Just a note to developers who have done an absolutely amazing job pulling together this project. Your efforts are fantastic, you just need somebody who business advisory services to indicate which options and interfaces are industry standard at present. Accounting for FX is one problematic area where an industry partnership would be very beneficial to the development team. Right now it feels a bit too raw despite 10+ years of development. It's not to blame the developers, but rather a major improvement point for those who drive the roadmap and interface with the accounting profession. Peter Selinger is a good starting point, but he's not an accountant and hence he does not understand UI choices which are out there in the business world. You really need industry experience. In any case, after spending a few days playing around with the system here's my 2c on the current shape of gnucash: - absolutely fine for keeping personal income/expenditure books - fine (although slightly cumbersome) for basic investment portfolio management - lacking for more sophisticated financial instrument including FX, futures, options etc (I spent a serious effort hacking it as required functionality is not present out of the box). - inappropriate for any institutional investments management. It is simply too cumbersome, too limited or non existing options for complex instruments, no productivity/interfacing considerations for an investment business - lacking but doable for small businesses as long as there's no FX or other complex accounting entries - inappropriate for either SME with FX or complex accounting entries, or anything with more than 1 person at the helm. Alternatives: - proprietary investment portfolio applications (cost may be justified if your focus is productivity + reporting functions) - proprietary accounting software such as Sage (but stay away from cloud implementations (MYOB, Xero etc as you will not own data) - open source ERM systems such as Tryton (but still very raw and I would personally not recommend touching it directly unless you have a dev team) My personal choice: - gnucash is fine for keeping track of my investments (although I wasted a lot of effort hacking it) - Sage as a SME platform (my time is the most dear resource and I'm happy supporting a commercial solution which delivers on productivity and support) - running it under a Windows VM. Again thank you for a fantastic open-source personal finance management solution! Happy hacking! -------------------------------- Although not strictly foreseen by the documentation, it is in fact possible to have the realized gain/loss transaction separate. The method to create that transaction is in fact very similar to the above: Start entering a new transaction for the realized gain/loss, choose the Income:Gain or Expense:Loss account. Then in *expanded* (transaction journal) mode enter the gain/loss in the income/expense split (*). The Edit Exchange Rate dialog comes up, choose "To Amount" = 0. Enter. Gnucash will automatically create the transaction into the trading account and the result is exactly what Peter Selinger recommends for this purpose. (*) Note: It is important not to enter the amount in the collapsed (single-line) view, as that would be interpreted as foreign currency (EUR) amount, but we want this part to be empty in the end: The final transaction shall have an empty row for the foreign currency (EUR) account - this is good since it makes the transaction show up in the EUR account (together with the corresponding 'sell' txn). If this behavior is not wanted, just remove the empty EUR account split line from the transaction, then the gain/loss is visible only in the corresponding Income/Expense account. -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
