mutual fund purchase doesn't reduce cash balance

Jason McLaren gnucash at fnord.ca
Sat Oct 25 13:55:17 CDT 2003


Hi,

I just wanted to say, gnucash is great -- thanks for this useful piece 
of software.  I've been using it happily since version 1.6.6.

Anyways, since upgrading to version 1.8.7, I've had a bit of a problem. 
  I was hoping someone might be able to help me figure out what I'm 
doing wrong.  I've read the fine manuals and scanned the mailing list 
archives to no avail.

Here's my problem:  when I transfer money from a bank account to a 
mutual fund account, the mutual fund balance increases but the bank 
balance remains unchanged.

Now here are the details.  My gnucash accounts contain the following 
account hierarchy:

Broker (Account Type=Asset, Commodity=CAD)
   |-- Cash (Account Type=Bank, Commodity=CAD)
   |-- FOO965 (Account Type=Mutual Fund, Commodity=FOO965)

The CAD commodity has Type=CURRENCY (it's the Canadian dollar).  The 
FOO965 commodity was created by me and has Type=FUND (it's a mutual 
fund).

The Cash account is supposed to represent cash I have sitting around in 
my brokerage account, and FOO965 represents shares of a mutual fund 
held in the brokerage account.

Suppose I have C$10 in the Cash account, and 10 shares in the FOO965 
account. Then I buy C$10 worth of shares (at C$2 each) of FOO965, and 
represent this in gnucash by transferring C$10 from Cash to FOO965.

This is how the transaction appears in the FOO965 account in split form 
(the column headings are from the non-split format for (hopeful) 
clarity):

Description Transfer                Shares Price Buy Sell Balance
Buy         <blank>                 5            5        15
Buy         Assets:Broker:FOO965    5      2     10
<blank>     Assets:Broker:Cash                       10
<blank>     <blank>                        1

This is how it appears in the Cash account in split form:

Description Transfer                Shares Price Buy Sell Balance
Buy         <blank>                                       10
Buy         Assets:Broker:FOO965
<blank>     Assets:Broker:Cash
<blank>     <blank>

So the F00965 balance is increased by 5 shares, but the Cash balance is 
not decreased by 10 dollars as I would expect.

Then I have manually created a corresponding entry in the price editor 
for FOO965, but that only seems to affect the Total column in the 
accounts screen.

I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.  Is there some additional 
currency conversion I need to do?  Are the accounts denominated in the 
correct commodities?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--jason



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