Balance Sheet

[Ernst Arnold]

Hi,
I am new to gnucash and I know only a little bit of accounting. As far as I 
understand the balance sheet (BS) is the single most important report that the 
accounts produce. It is based on the account summary 
(AS) which is simpler to understand.

At first I was surprised that the total in the AS is not zero although all 
transactions are balanced.
Maybe the Label "Total" in the AS did mislead me, it is the "Total of only the 
income and expense accounts".

But then 30/6/04 I got a total of 329.31 although expense and income are 0 !
First guess: the equity is wrong because asset and liability are easy to 
understand. (the file has only one 
single currency, but there are shares and bonds. I have reduced the original 
multi-currency file by eliminating all foreign currency accounts and by 
balancing currency transfers against the owners equity. I did this in the 
hope that it was a currency problem only which would be eliminated.)

Is it possible to conclude that the 329.31 are due to variations in commodity 
prices? Then the 329.31 would be un-realised capital gain/loss. Or is there 
another imbalance involved?

Consequently the balance sheet is out of balance by the same amount.
There is a row titled unrealised capital gain/loss in the BS which shows zero. 
It seems that Gnucash  calculates this automatically? Why is it not used in 
this case to balance the equation?

Another question about the BS: why is there a date range in the title? Isn't 
the BS a snapshot at one point in time?

Generally I like Gnucash very much. The accounts tree gives me a much better 
feel than the categories used in some other programms. It would be nice if I 
could understand the mentioned peculiarities of Gnucash. 
Thanks for any help.

This is about Gnucash 1.8.11 on Fedora Core 3.
Best Regards
Ernst Arnold