Gnucash for bonds and ROI

Non-investing personal finance issues including insurance, credit, real estate, taxes, employment and legal issues such as trusts and wills.
Post Reply
Topic Author
Hebell
Posts: 964
Joined: Wed Aug 12, 2020 1:56 am
Location: Boca Raton, FL

Gnucash for bonds and ROI

Post by Hebell »

I am considering a move to using Gnucash. From the documentation, I can see it supports stocks and mutual funds. I want to know if it will allow me to use individual bonds as securities. Does it have a place where I can enter a name or CUSIP, and attach a maturation date and ideally a coupon rate. I would need to use it for ee bonds, i bonds, TIPS and MYGAs. My retirement strategy is a sleep well at night strategy, using laddered bonds and a much smaller amount of equity than I had during the accumulation stage.

Can I attach expenses to particular securities, such as a commission, or a tips premium? The reason I asked this of course is to compute an ROI, which incorporates expenses as well as dividends and interest payments.

In the investment screen, quicken lets you compute ROI. Will Gnucash also compute that for me? (To those not familiar, this is different than gains or losses).
User avatar
LazyNihilist
Posts: 1005
Joined: Sat Feb 19, 2011 8:56 pm

Re: Gnucash for bonds and ROI

Post by LazyNihilist »

I don't know if you can calculate ROI.
You can create entries for IBonds/EEBonds securities. There are entry fields labeled Name, CUSIP, Type, Symbol. If you want to track individual bonds as separate securities you will need to create entries for each one.
As for expenses attached to a particular security, in GnuCash, you have to create a category/sub-category for any expense. And this can then be attached in any 'Transaction' that is entered.
So in this case, you can create an Expense entry for each of the individual bonds. And when there is any transaction related to that bond, you can add it in that specific transaction.

I did track my I-Bonds using GnuCash, but it was all manual entries I did. For any interest income I received, I just created an entry under Income:IBondsInterest and referenced it in the transaction for that income.
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must -Thucydides
Post Reply