Stocks/add stock

See also: Online Quotes

Overview

For more information, see Chapter 9 of the GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts Guide.

GnuCash allows you to track your holdings in various types of investments, such as stocks and mutual funds. This page describes how to add stocks or mutual funds to your portfolio, with detailed instruction on the settings to use.

Stocks and mutual funds are types of commodities, and in GnuCash, an account for these investments is set up slightly differently from a checking or savings account. Most prominently, a stock account is denominated in shares of stock, rather than in a currency. In order to track your holdings, you need to provide details of that commodity to GnuCash.

Adding the Security to GnuCash

We will take the stock Amazon (AMZN) as an example.

• Go to Tools->Security Editor
• Click "Add"
• Put "Amazon" into the "Full Name" field
• Put "AMZN" into the "Symbol/Abbreviation" and "Display symbol" fields - for other stocks: the symbol depends on the source of your online quotes.
• Take "NASDAQ" as the type
• Optionally, ff you like to get online prices mark the field "Get online quotes", complete the following fields:-
  • Tick "Get Online Quotes"
  • Tick "Single"
  • Choose "Yahoo as JSON" from the dropdown list

Once saved, this security can now be used in the definition of an account. See this screenshot:-

Adding the Security Account

To create the new account to track your holdings, go to the Chart of Accounts window.

• Click New Account
• Put "AMZN" into the "Account name" field"
• Choose "Stock" as type
• Click on the "Select" button for the "Security/Currency" field
• Choose "NASDAQ" as type and "(AMZN) Amazon" as security
• Set Parent Account to an account in the Assets branch of your chart
• Click "Ok"

Optionally you will probably also want to add related income and expense accounts to track dividends and expenses associated with this stock.

If you chose to get online quotes you can receive online quotes by opening the Price Editor (Tools->Price editor) and clicking on "get quotes". See Online Quotes for more information.

Stocks noted in foreign currency

If you start your first (buy) transaction from your stock account, the currency of the parent account will be used. Assuming your default currency is USD and you wish to buy stocks in EUR, then you should first create a normal asset account of currency EUR and below this your stock accounts.

Alternatively you could start your first transaction from you EUR cash or bank account, but with the first approach everything is much clearer - also later if you forgot the nominal currency.