More Questions on New Quicken Import

[Charles Day]

On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 2:23 PM, Tom Browder <tom.browder at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 2:01 PM, Charles Day <cedayiv at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> > Just be aware that imported security sales not only fail to include
> capital
> > gains splits, but can put your books out of balance. Since you are
> unlikely
> > to have a great number of security sales transactions, I encourage you to
> > fix those now so that your portfolio will not include any problems
> > specifically due to the GnuCash importing process.
>
> Charles, aren't all those problems fixable later even if I don't
> attend to them?
>

Sure, you could wait, but some figures on reports will be wrong until you
do. If the number of sale transactions is small, it should be pretty quick
to fix. And for securities that you once held, but now do not hold at all,
the missing capital gains actually put the books out of balance. I would at
least get your books balanced before proceeding much further (see the trial
balance report) but that's me. In the meantime, until you add all the
missing capital gains splits you should have no confidence in the
"unrealized gains" figures shown in reports, because those figures may also
include realized gains. Likewise, your income will be off by the amount of
unaccounted, realized capital gains.

On the other hand, if you don't do much in the way of investing, or the
figures are sufficiently small, you may not care that much at present.

What I'm planning to do is fix one account at a time as I can get
> around to it, starting with the checking account which is the one I
> rely on the most.  The others I can live without (and let my heirs
> sort it out if need be).
>
> Thanks.
>
> -Tom
>

Cheers,
Charles