Trading Account Problems

[David T.]

The state of this feature leaves a lot to be desired. 


1) Tracking down documentation is difficult; as far as I can tell there is only one note about using Trading Accounts, which refers to an outside tutorial. That tutorial (and the placement of the Gnucash note) focus on currency trading, rather than stocks. Mike, your comment suggests that trading accounts affect stock transactions as well, which really should be clearly stated for users of Gnucash. The documentation for Gnucash needs beefing up by someone familiar with the feature set, with clear instruction on how a Gnucash user will apply the principles outlined in the external tutorial. The emphasis really needs to be on how this feature set is used and how it functions in Gnucash.


2) The non-reversible nature of this choice needs to be either changed so that users can reverse the option without hosing their data, or the unreversible nature of the choice needs to be prominently noted. Frankly, if I were Per, I'd be pretty frustrated right about now.

David



----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu>
To: Per Kjeldaas <kjeldaas at acm.org>; gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Cc: 
Sent: Thursday, December 1, 2011 8:49 PM
Subject: Re: Trading Account Problems

--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

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