gnuGord, David, There is nothing in accounting practice per se to stop you tracking unrealized gains or losses for your own purposes, e.g. management of your assets.
It is just that they are not usually recognized for purposes like taxation and financial reporting as income or expenses for a business until they have actually been incurred, usually on the sale of the asset/stock involved.There are some cases in some jurisdictions where they are recorded for financial reporting in addition to realized gains and losses but this is not common. Capital gains taxes do not normally apply to unrealized gains or losses. The rules on this vary between jurisdictions and this is a case where local professioanl accounting advice is needed. If you are going to track them, you would normally do so against a sub-account of Equity labelled as "Unrealized Gains or Losses" (which may or may not in turn have sub-accounts for specific assets or asset classes depending on the detail you require). It would be also a good practice to have a sub-account totalling into the asset account for the particular asset to record unrealized gains and losses so that you can easily differentiate realized gains and losses from unrealized gains and losses in your accounts where you are using them to formulate input for taxation and financial reporting . The sale transaction which zeros the asset value and debits your bank or brokerage account then includes two additional splits which zero out the unrealized gains and losses balances in the asset sub account and the Unrealized Gains and Losses account(s) in Equity. David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- 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.
