Does GnuCash recognize unrealized gains/losses of investments such as stocks, so that they would appear in an Income Statement for a given period and in a Balance Sheet for a given date? And if so, how/where, and can one control the presentation?
The online documentation of the Tutorial and Concepts Guide, (at www.gnucash.org) doesn't say. A lot of effort seems to be devoted to the good purpose of developing/maintaining the automated updating of prices for securities, drawing from the internet. The Investments Chapter covers purchases and sales and other transactions, and in 9.6.5 has an example "Assets Over Time" bar chart (found by selecting Reports / Assets & Liabilities / Asset Chart, apparently) showing the changing value of an investment in Amazon stock, using varying price quotes, so surely an updated "most recent" value is available for reporting the value of the Amazon investment in the Balance Sheet report for any given date, either in total or by basis vs. unrealized gain/loss amounts. Also the amount of unrealized gain/loss achieved for any period could be computed, using the price database. Chapter 11 describes manual updating of asset value for a valuable painting by an explicit entry recognizing unrealized gain, but this seems not applicable to securities. Do the B/S and IS reports reflect these? Sorry for dumb aspect of this question, because I should be able to figure that out by testing an example. I am guessing not because it is not described. If the reports automatically do, then the documentation should report that (and I think it should be highlighted as a really nice feature of GnuCash not done by, say, Quickbooks AFAIK). If not, can the amounts be reported, so one could at least manually record, by journal entry dated December 31, what is necessary for the B/S and IS to report correctly in total? If it is automatically done, it seems to me that one would want to designate where each stock's unrealized gain/loss should go, e.g. into a general "Unrealized Gain/Loss - Taxable" or a "-Non-Taxable" account. Or for a more specific account like "Unrealized Gain/Loss in Education Fund" (to relate this to ongoing thread titled "non-currency liabilities"). The not-dumb aspect of this question is to call for a new section in Chapter 9 and/or Chapter 11 to cover this topic, for an individual and/or for a business, whether the feature is already developed within GnuCash 4.0, or not. --Don _______________________________________________ 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.
