Trading Account Problems

[Mike Alexander]

--On December 1, 2011 8:58:37 PM -0600 Per Kjeldaas <kjeldaas at acm.org> 
wrote:

> I elected to use trading accounts, and now I am looking for a way to
> reverse my election, but cannot find it.  It turns out that with this
> election, if you split an old transaction, it will immediately become
> unbalanced, and the system asks you to make it balanced or it will do
> it for you by the use of trading accounts.  Of course, it was already
> balanced before I opened it.  Now the trading accounts will be
> involved in every stock purchase and sale, with stock-type
> sub-accounts created for every transaction.
>
> How can I reverse my unfortunate selectipn?

There really isn't any easy way to get rid of trading accounts once 
you've started using them.  It's true that they will be involved in 
every stock transaction, but that's what they are for so it shouldn't 
be too surprising.

If you want to try to get rid of them you can turn off the option in 
the Properties page and then delete all the trading accounts.  Select 
the top level "Trading" account and delete it.  Select the options to 
delete subaccounts and move transactions to some new account.  This 
will probably leave your transactions in a strange state and you'll 
have to clean up all the ones that formerly used trading accounts.  I 
would very strongly recommend making a backup of your data file before 
trying this.

It might be easier to go back to some backup file from before you used 
trading accounts and reenter all the subsequent transactions with the 
option turned off if there aren't too many.

Actually the best thing would probably be to try to learn how to use 
trading accounts effectively and keep them.  This is probably less work 
than either of the other two options.

       Mike