More Balance Sheet Woes

[David Brock]

Derek Atkins wrote:

>Hi,
>
>David Brock <david at tubits.com> writes:
>
>  
>
>>But, there are changes in account balances that have *no* corresponding 
>>entries in the General Ledger.  Mutual Fund "ABC" account went down by 
>>52.07 over the period, but no GL entry specifying that account.  Same 
>>for another Asset account that changed by 0.01.
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, this is a known deficiency in gnucash 1.8.x -- it does not
>properly account for buy/sell price differentials when converting
>commodities.
>
>  
>
>>I have heard it said that the Balance Sheet is busticated, but not sure 
>>if that problem was fixed in 1.8.10- is it possible that these errors 
>>are not from my data, but from the report? 
>>    
>>
>
>Any time you transfer from one commodity to another, gnucash has the
>potential to lose information.  This can cause the balance sheet to
>get out of balance.  It's certainly the case that all 1.8 versions of
>gnucash have this deficiency.
>
>Your best bet is to manually handle any cap-gains or cap-losses from
>the sale of assets by adding a balancing split to the sale
>transaction.  In short, here's the issue:
>
>1) Each transaction is balanced in the "transaction currency".  E.g.,
>   you buy 20 shares at $10, so it balances at $200.
>2) Accounts always maintain the balance of the commodity, not the currency.
>   E.g. a stock account keeps track of the number of shares purchased,
>   not the value of those purchased shares.
>3) There is an implicit value of a stock account, i.e. there's an
>   implicit currency-value for all the shares you purchased.  This is
>   what you see in the balance sheet.
>4) When you sell stock, it balances the sale transaction (#1) and
>   modifies the number of shares in the account (#2) but does not
>   balance the implicit value of the account (#3).  So the balance
>   sheet thinks you put (bought shares * buy price) into the account,
>   and took (sold shares * sale price) out of the account, but has no
>   accounting for the difference in value when buy price != sale
>   price.
>
>  
>
Yes, I should have mentioned that this is what was made clear to me last 
time around- and I worked past it by doing roughly what you suggested- 
keeping the commodity count in check, and fudging the amount/price 
accordingly.  That worked, when I could find the transaction, although 
it's slow (I'm still way back in the mid-nineties)

However, in this case, there isn't a transaction in the commodity 
register, or in the General Ledger at all (as far as I can see)  I'm 
heading home to have a closer look, but from the other night when I 
investigated it, I could see no transactions for that day, but the value 
of the asset accounts int he BalSheet changed over the days mentioned.

Is this possible?  Am I mistaken in my sample?  Is there any way to sift 
through the data, identifying the components making up the report?  This 
is why I suggested exporting and re-importing my data into a clean sheet 
in small chunks until the problem is found, or goes away.

I'll verify this tonight, and update if anything new comes up.

;-David

>The next major release of gnucash should handle this much better, but
>that's not ready for release, yet.
>
>-derek
>
>  
>