Balance sheet, stock sale, unrealized gain or loss

Errol Siegel errol at bitterkitten.com
Sun Jan 14 01:31:39 EST 2007


I have been using GnuCash for many releases and noticed right away that
I could not get a balance sheet to balance once I sold any stock.

I am now trying the 2.0 release and I am seeing the same symptoms.

I want to describe again what I have done to make sure that I am not
missing something.

I set up an example file where I have a checking account starting
balance of $1,000.

I purchase 10 shares of stock at $10 per share out of the checking
account.

The next day I purchase 20 shares of stock at $5 per share out of the
checking account.

The day after that I sell 13 shares of stock at $4 per share.

If I use the Lot Viewer to "scrub account" then it adds a transaction to
account for the $60 loss from selling the initial 10 shares and a
transaction to account for the $3 loss from selling 3 shares from the
purchase of 20 shares.

I entered entries for this stock manually in the price editor for each
of the days that there were transactions (I used the NAV option).

I created balance sheets using all three options for the commodities
values.

Weighted average:

This shows the current value of the asset as a weighted average, but
does not calculate an unrealized loss at all, so the report does not
balance.

Most recent:

This shows the current value of the asset based on the most recent entry
in the price editor, but shows the unrealized loss as $56.53 so the
report does not balance.

Unless I'm mistaken, the unrealized loss should be $17.  I still have 17
of the shares I purchased at $5 per share, but they are now only worth
$4 per share.

Nearest in time:

This still shows the current value of the asset based on the most recent
entry in the price editor ($68) and it shows an unrealized loss of
$56.53.  This is the same as what "Most recent" showed.  I don't
understand how these numbers were calculated (or how they were supposed
to be calculated).

Am I doing something wrong?


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