Trouble with Investment account and balance sheet.

[Jean-David Beyer]

I just started using gnucash 1.8.8 (I hope that does not matter, but it is
all I have gotten to work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3) for investments.

I just set up an investment account named Margin (it is an asset account of
type "bank"), and under it an account named Berkshire (it is type "stock").

Now I stuck an initial balance of 5 shares in there @ $1487.125 in 2000, and
got that from Equity->Initial Balances.

If I then run a balance sheet, it is correct and Assets match Liabilites&Equity.

But if I then sell one share @$2995 today, the number of shares ges down by
one, the $2995 I debit to the parent (Margin) account, so its total goes up
by $2995.

But if I run a balance sheet again, the Assets do not match the
liabilities+equity.

If I look at the accounts register, it says Margin is $14975. which is
correct and that Berkshire is 4 shares BRK.B, which is also correct.

But the balance sheet says there is $2995. in the Margin account (true) and
$6953.75 in the Berkshire account. But what is really in there is 4 BRK.B
worth $2995. each, or $11980. The trouble is that even if the balance sheet
said that, it would make the unbalance even worse. It says

Assets               $13490.69
Liabilities            $942.27
Total Equity         $10035.29

Liabilities & Equity $10977.56

I am not ready to say GnuCash has an error in it, but more likely that I am
seriously misunderstanding something. But what?

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