# Chapter 7 Investments

This chapter explains how to manage your investments with GnuCash. Most people have a investment plan, whether its just putting money into a CD account, investing through a company sponsored plan at your workplace or buying and selling stocks and bonds through a brokerage. GnuCash gives you tools to help you manage these investments such as the Price Editor which allows you to record changes in the prices of stocks you own.

## 7.1 Setting Up Accounts (Discussion)

To setup investment accounts in GnuCash you can either use any of the predefined categories or setup your own. Investment accounts in GnuCash fall into two asset sub-categories, Current Assets and Investments. The Current Assets category is used for the types of accounts that are like savings accounts at your bank such as CD's and Money Market accounts. The Investments category is used for the types of accounts where you have a more direct ownership stake in the company you are investing in.

We discussed previously how you could use a strategy of just setting up two accounts to track paying a credit card bill, this simple formula applies also here. The minimum you need to do to track investments in GnuCash is to setup an account for your brokerage firm or trading account and to add shares to it with a price per share and the transfer account that is paying for the investment listed in the transfer box. GnuCash will automatically calculate the value of the shares and show at the top of the register both the number of shares you own and their current value.

You can also track each different type of investment individually such as

- Brokerage Accounts

- CD's

- Treasury Bills

- Money Market

- Mutual Funds

- Stocks

- Bonds

- Retirements accounts

## 7.2 Creating a Portfolio for Your Current Holdings (How-To)

If you used the template account setup back in Chapter's 2 & 3, you will see the investment accounts in two places under the Assets category. You can use this as a portfolio for your investments or if you wish, create your own by creating a new sub-account under Assets.

1. In order to receive online price quotes for your stocks you will need to setup the Perl module Finance::Quote. This is done by opening a root terminal session and typing in 'update-finance-quote' (without the quote marks). This will launch a Perl CPAN update session which goes out onto the internet in order to install the above module onto your system. If you feel uncomfortable about doing this please either email the gnucash-user mailing list (gnucash-user@gnucash.org) asking for help or come to the gnucash irc channel on irc.gnome.org. You can also leave out this step and manually update your stock prices.

2. You should now have at least one stock account under the Assets category. Select the Assets category: insert investaccts.png

3. Go to the menu and select: Account Open Subaccounts . This will show you the Portfolio view.

## 7.3 Buying New Investments (How-To)

## 7.4 Selling Investments (How-To)

## 7.5 Recording Dividends and Interest (How-To)

## 7.6 Recording Stock Splits and Mergers (How-To)

## 7.7 Recording Employee Stock Plans (Discussion)

### 7.7.1 Stock Purchase Plans (How-To)

### 7.7.2 Stock Options (How-To)

## 7.8 Managing your Portfolio (Discussion)

### 7.8.1 Portfolio View

### 7.8.2 Updating Prices (How-To)

### 7.8.3 Measuring Capital Gains (Discussion)

## 7.9 Reconciling with the Brokerage Statement (How-To)

## 7.10 Putting It All Together (Examples)