Equity Account Postings - a bug or a misunderstanding?

[Philip Haynes]

Hi All,
I have a situation where I am making some postings in gnucash and the
resulting values are making no sense to me at all (from an accounting
perspective). The lack of sense is such that I am leaning towards a
bug explanation rather than a user problem (I know, a dangerous
assumption).

So here we go;

I have a mutual fund account that regularly (monthly) sells a number
of units in order to generate a cash amount.
The date of the transaction for "selling" the funds is one date and
the date at which the resulting money is credited to my account is a
separate date, usually two days later.
Both of these accounts are owned by a Trust and so the set of accounts
I am managing with gnucash are the accounts for the Trust.
I load both these data sets from different QIF files from different
insitutions, the sell from my fund manager and the cash receipt from
my bank.

As a result of this date inconvenience I have to post the amount from
the "sale of the funds" somewhere until I am able to link it to the
bank transaction receiving the cash.

Here is where the problem occurs;

My thought is that this posting should be to an equity account, so I
have one, but when I post the proceeds of the sale of the Fund to this
account it shows a decrease in equity which does not seem right to me.
This transaction, a sell from a commodity (the fund) should give me an
increase in equity. It's all ok insofar as when I then post the funds
to the bank account from this equity account they appear as a funds
increase in my bank account, its just that I don't see why this
process should decrease the equity of my Trust.

This thought is reinforced by the fact that if I post it to a
liability account instead, I get a decrease in liability which makes
perfect sense in the same way that an increase in equity make sense.

I am running stable (r17949M built 2009-09-14) on unbuntu.

Am I making an error or is the equity account getting the sign of the
postings "reversed"?

Thanks,
Philip


-- 
Philip Haynes