How do I do double-entry bookkeeping for separately-managed investment accounts?
"For any accounts where you have a wish to keep track of dividends, gains and losses, etc., you will have to set up a an account to hold the separately listed securities.  It looks like you already know how to do this.  Here the trading accounts will help you, especially if you have Finance:Quote set up (to pull security prices from the internet). For the actively-managed accounts, you can just create each managed account and NOT fill it with the separate securities.  You can record the changes in that account in summary each month/year as you prefer. So, you might set up your chart of accounts to include these assets: And this income: The actively-managed accounts will each get set up as Type ""Stock.""  You will create one fake security for each account, which will get your unrealized gains/losses on active accounts showing up in your trading accounts.  The fake securities will NOT be pulling prices from the internet.  Go to     Tools -> Securities Editor -> Add and type in a name such as ""Merrill Lynch Brokerage,"" a symbol such as ""ML1,"" and in the ""Type"" field input something like ""Actively Managed."" In your self-managed accounts, you will record dividends and sales as they occur, and your securities will be set to get quotes online.  You can follow the general GnuCash guides for this.   In your too-many-transactions actively traded accounts, maybe once a month you will gather up your statements and enter the activity in summary to tie the changes in cost basis.  I would suggest making each fake ""share"" equal $1, so if you have a $505 dividend, you buy 505 ""shares"" with it.  So, you might have these transactions for your brokerage account with Merrill Lynch (for example): When you have finished making your period-end summary entries for all the actively-managed accounts, double-check that the share balances of your actively-managed accounts match the cost basis amounts on your statements.  Remember that each fake ""share"" is worth $1 when you enter it.  Once the cost basis is tied, you can go into the price editor (Tools -> Price Editor) and enter a new ""price"" as of the period-end date for each actively-managed account.  The price will be ""Value of Active Acct at Period-End/Cost of Active Acct at Period-End.""  So, if your account was worth $1908 but had a cost basis of $505 on Jan. 31, you would type ""1908/505"" in the price field and Jan. 31, 2017 in the date field. When you run your reports, you will want to choose the price source as ""Nearest in Time"" so that GnuCash grabs the correct quotes. This should make your actively-managed accounts have the correct activity in summary in your GnuCash income accounts and let them work well with the Trading Accounts feature."
"I think you have succumbed to a category error. The rational course forward is to classify all property as either his, hers, or family's. Each contributes a portion of wages to the family. Each logs hours spent performing familial duties and is ""paid"" in virtual dollars into their family account at market rates for that service. At any point actual plus virtual dollars are summed to assess the value of the family and percentages are allocated to each party on this basis. Put this into a pre-nuptual agreement.  At the time of the inevitable divorce you leave with yours, she leaves with hers, family's assets are divided as described, and division of children should be as King Solomon suggested. Or you could do what I did: Put all your property (and debts) into one pot. Make sure each partner can competently manage bookkeeping and investments. Accumulate a family net worth sufficient to divide in two and each have financial independence. (I'm working on this last step.)" Account statements and the account information provided by your personal finance software should be coming from the same source, namely your bank's internal accounting records. So in theory one is just as good as the other. That being said, an account statement is a snapshot of your account on the date the statement was created, while synchronizations with your personal finance application is dynamically generated upon request (usually once a day or upon login).  So what are the implications of this? Your account statement will not show transactions that may have taken place during that period but weren't posted until after the period ended (common with credit card transactions and checks). Instead they'd appear on the next statement. Because electronic account synchronizations are more frequent and not limited to a specific time period those transactions will show up shortly after they are posted. So it is far easier to keep track of your accounts electronically. Every personal finance software I've ever used supports manual entries so what I like to do is on a daily basis I manually enter any transaction which wasn't posted automatically. This usually only takes a few minutes each evening. Then when the transaction eventually shows up it's usually reconciled with my manually entered one automatically.  Aside from finding (infrequent) bank errors this has the benefit of keeping me aware of how much I'm spending and how much I have left. I've also caught a number of cashier errors this way (noticing I was double-charged for an item while entering the receipt total) and its the best defense against fraud and identity theft I can think of. If you're looking at your accounts on a daily basis you're far more likely to notice an unusual transaction than any monitoring service. "Asset = Equity + (Income - Expense) + Liability Everything could be cancelled out in double entry accounting.  By your logic, if the owner contributes capital as asset, Equity is ""very similar"" to Asset.  You will end up cancelling everything, i.e. 0 = 0.  You do not understate liability by cancelling them with asset.  Say you have $10000 debtors and $10000 creditors. You do not say Net Debtors = $0 on the balance sheet.  You are challenging the fundamental concepts of accounting.  Certain accounts are contra accounts. For example, Accumulated Depreciation is Contra-Asset. Retained Loss and Unrealized Revaluation Loss is Contra-Equity." I have managed two IRA accounts; one I inherited from my wife's 401K and my own's 457B.  I managed actively my wife's 401 at Tradestation which doesn't restrict on Options except level 5 as naked puts and calls. I moved half of my 457B funds to TDAmeritrade, the only broker authorized by my employer, to open a Self Directed account.  However, my 457 plan disallows me from using a Cash-secured Puts, only Covered Calls.  For those who does not know investing, I resent the contention that participants to these IRAs should not be messing around with their IRA funds.  For years, I left my 401k/457B funds with my current fund custodian, Great West Financial.  I checked it's current values once or twice a year. These last years, the market dived in the last 2 quarters of 2015 and another dive early January and February of 2016.  I lost a total of $40K leaving my portfolio with my current custodian choosing all 30 products they offer, 90% of them are ETFs and the rest are bonds. If you don't know investing, better leave it with the pros - right?  But no one can predict the future of the market.  Even the pros are at the mercy of the market. So, I you know how to invest and choose your stocks, I don't think your plan administrator has to limit you on how you manage your funds. For example, if you are not allowed to place a Cash-Secured Puts and you just Buy the stocks or EFT at market or even limit order, you buy the securities at their market value. If you sell a Cash-secured puts against the stocks/ETF you are interested in buying, you will receive a credit in fraction of a dollar in a specific time frame.  In average, your cost to owning a stock/ETF is lesser if you buy it at market or even a limit order.  Most of the participants of the IRA funds rely too much on their portfolio manager because they don't know how to manage. If you try to educate yourself at a minimum, you will have a good understanding of how your IRA funds are tied up to the market.  If you know how to trade in bear market compared to bull market, then you are good at managing your investments.  When I started contributing to my employer's deferred comp account (457B) as a public employee, I have no idea of how my portfolio works.  Year after year as I looked at my investment, I was happy because it continued to grow.  Without scrutinizing how much it grew yearly, and my regular payroll contribution, I am happy even it only grew 2% per year.  And at this age that I am ready to retire at 60, I started taking investment classes and attended pre-retirement seminars.  Then I knew that it was not totally a good decision to leave your retirement funds in the hands of the portfolio manager since they don't really care if it tanked out on some years as long at overall it grew to a meager 1%-4% because they managers are pretty conservative on picking the equities they invest.  You can generalize that maybe 90% of IRA investors don't know about investing and have poor decision making actions which securities/ETF to buy and hold. For those who would like to remain as one, that is fine.  But for those who spent time and money to study and know how to invest, I don't think the plan manager can limit the participants ability to manage their own portfolio especially if the funds have no matching from the employer like mine. All I can say to all who have IRA or any retirement accounts, educate yourself early because if you leave it all to your portfolio managers, you lost a lot.  Don't believe much in what those commercial fund managers also show in their presentation just to move your funds for them to manage.  Be proactive.  If you start learning how to invest now when you are young, JUST DO IT! Best Linux software is PostBooks. It is full double entry, but there is definitely a learning curve.  For platform-agnostic, my favorite is Xero, which is web-based. It is full double entry balance sheet, the bank reconciliation is a pleasure to use, and they are coming out with a US version this summer. Easy to use and does everything I need. I'm not familiar with Gnucash, but I can discuss double-entry bookkeeping in general. I think the typical solution to something like this is to create an Asset account for what this other person owes you. This represents the money that he owes you. It's an Accounts Receivable. Method 1: Do you have/need separate accounts for each company that you are paying for this person? Do you need to record where the money is going? If not, then all you need is: When you pay a bill, you credit (subtract from) Checking and debit (add to) Friend Account. When he pays you, you credit (subtract from) Friend Account and debit (add to) Checking. That is, when you pay a bill for your friend you are turning one asset, cash, into a different kind of asset, receivable. When he pays you, you are doing the reverse. There's no need to create a new account each time you pay a bill. Just keep a rolling balance on this My Friend account. It's like a credit card: you don't get a new card each time you make a purchase, you just add to the balance. When you make a payment, you subtract from the balance. Method 2: If you need to record where the money is going, then you'd have to create accounts for each of the companies that you pay bills to. These would be Expense accounts.  Then you'd need to create two accounts for your friend: An Asset account for the money he owes you, and an Income account for the stream of money coming in. So when you pay a bill, you'd credit Checking, debit My Friend Owes Me, credit the company expense account, and debit the Money from My Friend income account.  When he repays you, you'd credit My Friend Owes Me and debit Checking. You don't change the income or expense accounts. Method 3: You could enter bills when they're received as a liability and then eliminate the liability when you pay them. This is probably more work than you want to go to. There are two basic issues here.  First, there is the difference between accounting terms and their dictionary definitions.  Second, once you dig into it there are dichotomies similar to put vs call options, long sales vs short sales, bond yield vs interest rate.  (That is, while they are relatively simple ideas and opposite sides of the same coin, it will probably take some effort to get comfortable with them.) The salient points from the Wikipedia article on debits and credits: In double-entry bookkeeping debit is used for increases in asset and expense transactions and credit is used for increases in a liability, income (gain) or equity transaction. For bank transactions, money deposited in a checking account is treated as a credit transaction (increase) and money paid out is treated as a debit transaction, because checking account balances are bank liabilities. If cash is deposited, the cash becomes a bank asset and is treated as a debit transaction (increase) to a bank asset account. Thus a cash deposit becomes two equal increases: a debit to cash on hand and a credit to a customer's checking account. Your bank account is an asset to you, but a liability to your bank.  That makes for a third issue, namely perspective. Yes, add the stocks/mutual funds that you want and then you would just need to add all the transactions that you theoretically would have made. Performing the look up on the price at each date that you would have sold or bought is quite tedious as well as adding each transaction.