New Account TYPES and Commodity NAMESPACES

[argaen]

Maffin is a place where you can track all your assets. Some of the assets are out of the norm of what Gnucash provides. Below are some of the new ones I would like to see

New types and namespaces

Hard/Soft commodities

Some people may want to track a bunch of these commodities that include things like cattle, wheat, oil, etc. Note this is the product itself, not secondary markets which I guess you can find a bunch of those in yahoo finance with a ticker.

For these, since there's no different use case my proposal for now is to keep them in the OTHER commodity namespace and set the account type as ASSET. It's important that this has a dedicated commodity as you can buy more cattle, kg, etc and you want to know how many you have.

Real estate

This is known as Fixed Assets and includes home, warehouse, land, cars, etc. Users need to be able to track that and I want to build extra functionality for these types of assets as I'm a user. In my case I have a rented property and I want to see the net profit I get from renting it (with deducting utilities, taxes, community, etc).

My proposal for these is to create a new Account type called FIXED_ASSET and the associated commodity is the currency used to pay it. These ASSETS won't change price and will only declare when you sell (profit or loss).

Others

There will be for sure other types of Assets which we want to count and change price often? For now we have the OTHER commodity namespace, the more we learn the more we will be adding if we see there are specific use cases for each type.

What is an investment?

There are some combinations that are clearly investments like those with Commodity being a STOCK/MUTUAL. I.e. financial commodities.

Having property is not an investment as you don't have a variable price that gets synced over time so FIXED_ASSETS shouldn't be included.

For CUSTOM assets, it really depends on the user, how open they want to track the change in price and if they consider it an investment or something that is just... there, being counted (for example Cattle?). The proposal then is: Get rid of STOCK/MUTUAL asset types and call it INVESTMENT. The user can then change the account type to INVESTMENT for whatever account they want (restriction would be that the commodity is not a CURRENCY).