Incomplete records: how to deal with them?

[Andrea Borgia]

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.

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.

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?

TIA for your help,
Andrea.

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