Unbalanced balance sheet

[Derek Atkins]

Derrick Ashby <daeroncs at fastmail.fm> writes:

> Well, I've never checked code out of a CVS repository before, but I
> guess I could give it a try.  I'd be reluctant to do so on my
> production machine, but I have a spare pc with linux installed that
> I could use.  I've graduated from Mandrake and/or Red Hat to using
> Gentoo in the last couple of years, and the spare pc hasn't been
> synced for a while, so it might take me a while to get the cvs
> version up and running (assuming I can get it to compile in the
> first place - not being a linux coding guru).  Any useful tips on
> how to proceed?

Read the CVS page at www.gnucash.org.  Follow the instructions to
checkout the mainline (head) branch.  Run "autogen.sh
--prefix=/opt/gnucash" then run "make" and "make install".

> By the way - I had been running version 1.8.9, but I upgraded to
> 1.8.10, which the guys at Gentoo still have in testing.  This didn't
> make any difference to the Balance Sheet problem.

Not at all surprising..  The balance-sheet changes in HEAD have not
been back-ported to the 1.8 branch.

> Asset:Checking                    $200
> Asset:ABC            -10  $20             $200
> Asset:ABC              0    0     $100
> Income:Cap Gains                          $100
>
> I hate to be a killjoy, but this only works if you sell the entire
> parcel.  I had 420 shares in a stock that I entered at $31.  (In
> fact, I bought them in 1991 at $7.50!) I then sold 200 of them at
> $33, and entered my profit of $400 as a Capital Gain.  The inbalance
> varied depending on what setting I had for price calculation.  It
> was closest to balance when that was set to Most Recent.  When I
> claimed to have sold the entire parcel, it balanced.  I think that
> this indicates that the program has a problem when both the quantity
> and price of a commodity changes.

I think it's just a reporting issue, which doesn't surprise me at all.
The whole commodity-handling got screwed up a few major versions ago
and we're still trying to recover.  Of course all the devs that were
involved back then have long since left the project.  :(

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available