Balance sheet, stock sale, unrealized gain or loss

David G Hamblen dhamblen at adelphia.net
Sun Jan 14 09:04:23 EST 2007


I was able to make things balance by removing all the numeric-abs 
functions from the file /usr/share/gnucash/scm/commodity-utilities.scm.
I then had to fix a potential divide-by zero somewhere around line 390 
in report-utilities.scm in the same directory.

I have no idea why average values are being computed using absolute 
values of the share and cost data, but this fixes it for me.  I also 
don't understand scheme, etc; so I don't know if my changes impact 
anything else.

I've got some notes to myself lying around somewhere (maybe even a 
patch), which I could try to locate if anyone's interested.

dave


Errol Siegel wrote:
> 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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