It can be done, but it is tricky, especially if you have to report capital gains as FIFO. The documentation is in ledger is misleading/wrong (or was the last t

It can be done, but it is tricky, especially if you have to report capital gains as FIFO. The documentation is in ledger is misleading/wrong (or was the last time I looked). I have been meaning to write a blog post on this topic for ages (a year???). Warning: This may be wrong. I just grabbed it randomly out of a test file I was using to try this out and I don't have time to verify it. However, I think it will put you on the right track even if it is wrong (also not sure how to get it formatted correctly here). Anyway this is the kind of thing you have to do: 2014/09/04 Exchange Currency ; Note that the next line generates 20 GBP, not 10 GBP as you might expect ; This is so that the excess is captured by the capital gains account at the bottom ; Also note that the @ 0.50 GBP is not actually used by ledger in this case ; You could put @ 5000 GBP and it would do the same thing. The rate is ; determined by the lot price. Assets:CDN -20.00 CDN {1.00 GBP} @ 0.50 GBP ; It is unfortunate that you can't get ledger to calculate or assert the next value Assets:GBP 10.00 GBP ; Proceeds without commission Expenses:Commissions 0.20 GBP Assets:GBP -0.20 GBP ; Balance the commission Income:Capital Gains The main things you have to understand are that you need to specify the lot price in the transaction. Second, you must specify the price of the transaction. The P line is only used for calculating current value -- it will not set the price of the transaction correctly (if you don't specify it, I think it sets it to whatever the P line is set to when you run the report, which is clearly wrong). Also, you have to calculate either the total proceeds for the balancing account or the capital gains. Also, very unfortunately, with this scheme you can not use the @@ method of specifying the price. I do the math and calculate the result and let ledger calculate capital gains, because that seems the most reasonable thing to do. Some people feel very strongly that a human should calculate the capital gains by hand and enter that value. Either way should work. Hopefully the above should unstick you. If you are using average method for capital gains, it is dramatically simpler, but I don't have an example handy. Printing reports with the lot prices is incredibly useful as the lots should balance out to zero. If they do not, then you have an error somewhere (and boy does that suck). It's also very frustrating when doing FIFO or LIFO that you constantly need to run the report to show you how much you have left in each lot, and then go and figure out which lots are the next ones to use. I think this can be automated, but I haven't gotten around to doing it.