How best to do a Net Worth Report without including Unrealized Gains?

Perry Smith

I'm trying to do a Net Worth report but I would like to not include Unrealized Gains from my stocks.

The report facility seems to be very constrained. Is there a way to get around all the constraints and get to a more general purpose reporting mechanism?

Jon

No, there’s no secret “expert mode” for getting access to more reports than what you see.

What do you want this report to do with unsold investments? Report the cost basis or just exclude them entirely? I’m not sure either one is achievable.

jacobs

@Perry Smith I'm with @Jon in being a little unclear about what you're wanting to see. A report of net worth is, by definition, going to show the value of each of your assets and liabilities at a specific moment in time.

From the Portfolio screen, you can create a report of your investments showing the cost basis of your securities. That's certainly not a net worth report, but it is easily doable. You could do that, and then a traditional net worth report which excludes your investment accounts, if you're wanting to combine your other assets and liabilities with the cost basis of your investments, although I'm not sure I understand why you'd want that.

Perry Smith

What I'm trying to determine is if I am actually saving money where "saving" money is putting it into savings, stocks, or other assets. Perhaps I should have stated this up front because I might be starting out in the wrong direction entirely.

If I go to Reports, click Create Summary Report, deselect all accounts except Investment, then go to advanced and check the "Include unrealized gains", I get a report that has a line that says "Unrealized Gain/Loss". I'd like that number (whatever it may be) subtracted from the Net Worth for the same time period. I think that would give me the number that I'm looking for.

Perhaps my logic isn't sound or perhaps there is another approach that would give me what I'm looking for.

Part of my dislike is the Net Worth report uses completely different logic than the other types of reports and there is no way to create and customize the Net Worth report.

I agree that what I'm looking for is rather unique but it just seems like they could add the same flexibility to the Net Worth report that the other reports have.

NotACPA

@Perry Smith How about looking into reports that show Transfers into your various accounts? That would show the amount you're "saving" into your investment accounts, for example.

jacobs

How about looking into reports that show Transfers into your various accounts?

Yup, exactly what I was going to suggest.

Perry Smith

@NotACPA That seemed like a good idea but the only type of report that has Account in Row is Transaction and that report can't make multiple columns like Summary can do with time. I'm going to keep poking at it but so far, I haven't got what I'm looking for.

jacobs

You keep saying different things about what you're wanting. You said you wanted a report to see " if I am actually saving money where "saving" money is putting it into savings, stocks, or other assets." A transaction report of your transfers, set to the time period you specify, will show that. Now it seems you're asking for something else: are you wanting comparison of how much you're transferring into each savings account (rows) over a range of multiple time periods (columns)?

If so, I think you can get what you want:

• Create a Summary report.
• Set the Interval to the time period (month, quarter, year) you're looking for, and the date range for the total time period you want.
• In Edit > Accounts, de-select all accounts and then check only the "source" account for the savings you're looking to track (such as your checking account).
• In Edit > Categories, de-select every category.
• In Edit > Advanced, select "Include selected transfers with accounts outside or report."

The resulting report will have a row for each "TO" account, and columns for each time period in the total date range.

Perry Smith

Thank you. I didn't mean to change the targets. My true question is in the first post: 1) Some type of more flexible report method and 2) A way to remove "Unrealized gains" from Net Worth. This would give me "Savings" (or so I thought — keep reading).

I think I'm going to give up for two reasons.

1. I got a Net Worth report. Then on a small spreadsheet I put the Net Worth of 1/1/2024 and today (11/4/2024) in a row. Subtracted from that the "Gain/Loss" as seen with Investments selected when the date is set appropriately and Portfolio Value. So basically it was:

(Net Worth - Gain/Loss @ 11/4/2024) - (Net Worth - Gain/Loss @ 1/1/2024) = N

Then I got a Summary report and fiddled with the various settings, in particular those in the Advanced tab, but I could never get N to come up.

2. (and really the main reason) while doing this, I determined that the above formula is not really what I want. If I have stock on 1/1/2024 and sell it mid stream (i.e. convert unrealized gains until realized gains), then that is going to affect the Gain/Loss on 11/4/2024 and thus I'm not really looking at what I wanted to look at.

What I want is how much of my income is not being spent (by month). It would seem that a Inflow - Outflow (or Income / Expense) report would give it and it might but it wasn't what I thought I was looking for so I thought the Net Worth - Gains was what I wanted … Anyhow, all this to say that I was confused and so I need to go back and try and figure out what I'm trying to figure out 😆

BUT… it would be nice to have a report generator that is more flexible. With the options of a Summary report (for example) I don't really 100% know what is and is not being included.