Incomplete records: how to deal with them?

[Dave Peticolas]

Andrea Borgia writes:
> Hi.
> 
> My accounting only goes back to 1998 in its present detailed form (I'm
> manually converting from Excel to GnuCash), but I have recently cashed
> in a bond that was bought before that time.
> 
> Question is: how should I enter it in such a way that interests alone
> show up as an income, while the rest of the amount is simply my money
> coming back unchanged ? If it never left my pocket, how come I'm
> getting it back, I ask. I do not know if this makes sense, but
> basically I'm trying to have a realistic picture of the role played by
> interests in my income.

What if you entered it as a multi-split transaction with the original
portion coming from the bond account, the interest coming from an
Income account, and the balance going to your bank account or wherever.


> A related question: how should I enter pre-1998 mutual funds? Which
> date and price should I use? 1/1/1998 and the same day price or today
> and today's price? For bank accounts, I created an equity account and
> showed the initial amount as a transfer but it's not clear to me how
> to do the same for mutual funds.

Equity accounts can be denominated in something other than a currency.
For example, mutual fund shares.


> Also, when I enter a new share price (following the examples in
> trading2.xac), I get a bogus entry with a share price of 1. If I
> delete it, the real price entry vanishes too. Is this normal?

What version of GnuCash are you using?

thanks,
dave