Reconcile shows balance -0.00!

[Glen Ditchfield]

On October 12, 2001 12:53 pm, Roland Roberts wrote:
> Okay, I just reconciled one account which shows a balance of 0.00, but
> in the reconcile window, after marking everyhing, it shows a balance
> of -0.00 and warns me that the account is not balanced when I tell it
> to finish anyway.  This is GnuCash 1.4.2 on RedHat 7.1

The same happened to me in a bunch of higher-numbered 1.4.x versions, too.
   To debug the problem I went into the Settings > Preferences dialog box, on 
the General tab, and set the 'Minimum displayed decimal places' to 8.  Back 
in the register window, some transactions showed amounts involving tiny 
fractions of a cent.  When I reconciled the account, the balance was almost 
but not quite 0.00.
   All of the bad transactions were transfers to a mutual fund account where 
I had entered units bought (3 decimal places) and unit price (4 decimal 
places -- thousandths of a dollar), and let GnuCash calculate the value.  The 
value wasn't an integral number of cents, but it rounded to the correct value 
when displayed with 2 decimal places, so I hadn't noticed that anything was 
wrong.
   To fix the problem, I had to go back into the mutual fund accounts and 
edit the transactions.  I entered units bought and value, and let GnuCash 
calculate the unit price.
   I still run GnuCash 1.4.12 with 8 decimal places, and it mostly works.  My 
'bank' account shows amounts with two decimal places, and other accounts 
display values with trailing zeros omitted, so most numbers look right.  
Mutual funds display values to the microcent, which is excessive but amusing. 
The biggest problem is that the first transaction in a mutual fund displays a 
bogus price: for instance, I have one showing 15.649 units with a (correct) 
value of 100.00 but a price of '6'.