Equity Opening Balance not showing up for stock

[Derek Atkins]

hi,

On Mon, December 31, 2012 5:48 am, Chris Henderson wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 6:50 PM, Chris Henderson <henders254 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> I have added some equity opening balance but the dollar value is not
>> showing up under Equity:opening balance account.
>>
>> I go to Assets:Investment:Broker ABC:Stock:GOOG and add the stock as
>> equity:opening balance. And when I go to the other side (i.e.
>> equity:opening balance) it shows the transaction from
>> Assets:Investment:Broker ABC:Stock:GOOG but the Increase field is
>> empty. All my other stocks (which are with another broker) seem to
>> have been added fine.
>>
>> The account GOOG has account type stock, the account Stock has account
>> type: Bank with currency US Dollar (my default currency is Australian
>> dollar),  Broker ABC has account type: bank with currency US dollar.
>>
>> Thanks.
>
> I found out that if I change the Stock account from US Dollar to
> Australian Dollar, the transaction does show up in the Equity:Opening
> Balance account but if I change if back to USD, it doesn't show up any
> more. Wonder why and how to fix this.

The issue is that a Stock account doesn't have a backing currency, so
GnuCash uses its parent account to decide what backing currency to use
when creating transactions.  This currency gets used as the Transaction
Common Currency, which defines the currency for the "value" of each
transaction Split (the Split Amount is denoted in the Split Account
Commodity -- the stock in the case of your stock account, or another
currency in the case of your equity account).

What's going on is that you have a currency mismatch between the
transaction and the equity account, such that when you enter the
transaction, GnUCash cannot make the exchange.  This is the same thing
that happensif you create a multi-currency account without entering an
exchange rate: one end will be empty.

You have three ways to fix it:

1) Denote your stock in AUD.  This probably isn't correct, because you
probably need to pay your brokerage in USD and if you sell stock you'd get
USD back.

2) Create a USD Opening Balance Equity account, which you can use to hold
opening balances in USD.  You should have one of these for every currency
you have at your Start of Accounting.

3) Enter an exchange rate into the transaction.  You SHOULD be able to do
this in the stock account by Split-expanding the transaction and entering
the correct exchange rate from USD to AUD for the O-B Split.

Hope this helps.

> Thanks.

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant