8.6. Price Editor

Note

GnuCash uses the term commodity to mean anything that it counts: Currencies, securities (i.e intangible assets like stock or mutual fund shares and bonds), or tangible assets like trucks and computers. When valuing one commodity in terms of another it uses the term Exchange Rate between two currencies and Price between a non-currency commodity and a currency commodity. For the rest of this section we'll use "price" to mean both price and exchange rate and "commodity" to mean any sort of commodity except where currency behavior is different.

The Price Editor is used to list and edit the price of one commodity in another commodity. New prices can be added, existing prices can be edited, and prices can be retrieved from a variety of sources on the World-Wide Web when the commodity is properly configured.

Each commodity pair can have one price per day. An existing price will be overwritten by a newer one if the newer one has the same or a more preferred source. The order of source preference (1 is most preferred) is:

  1. user:price-editor: Prices created manually in the Price Editor

  2. Finance::Quote: Online quotes

  3. user:price: Prices entered explicitly in the Exchange Rateentry of the Transfer Funds dialog box or in the Price column of a register for an account of types STOCK or MUTUAL

  4. user:xfer-dialog: Prices calculated from an entry in the To Amount entry of the Transfer Funds dialog box.

  5. user:split-register: Prices calculated from the Shares and Debit or Credit columns of a register for an account of types STOCK or MUTUAL

  6. user:stock-split: Prices entered in the Stock Split Assistant

Note

Prices created manually in the Price Editor are preferred over prices retrieved via Finance::Quote so Finance::Quote will fail to update such manually-created prices.

The Price Editor displays existing prices as follows:

8.6.1. Adding a stock price manually

To add a new price, click on Add, and enter the details of the security and price into the dialog box. To edit an existing price, select the price in the price list, click the Edit button, and edit the figures.

To remove just one price, select the price and click the Remove button. If you want to remove all prices older than a certain date, click on the Remove Old button and enter the details in the dialog box.

A pop-up will display with the message "Delete all stock prices based upon the criteria below:". Enter the date of the last price you wish to delete.

Two check-boxes are below the date field;

  • Delete manually entered prices - If checked, delete manually entered stock prices dated earlier than the specified date. Otherwise only stock prices added by Finance::Quote will be deleted.

  • Delete last price for a stock - If checked, delete all prices before the specified date. Otherwise the last stock price dated before the date will be kept and all earlier quotes deleted.

8.6.2. Configuring for use of the Get Quotes button

To support on-line quotations for a particular stock or mutual fund account, you must first enable on-line price quoting and select a price source in the Security. This is described in detail in Section 8.7.2, “Configuring Securities/Currencies for On-Line Retrieval of Prices”. Once on-line quotes are enabled, and Finance::Quote is installed, you can update prices for your stocks and mutual funds manually by clicking the Get Quotes button.