Selling stock

[John Ralls]

On Mar 29, 2012, at 8:27 AM, David Carlson wrote:

> On 3/29/2012 9:00 AM, John Ralls wrote:
>> 
>> On Mar 29, 2012, at 6:25 AM, David Carlson wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> I was doing it wrong for a long time and now I am trying to go back and
>>> fix recent sales transactions first.  When I try to add the missing
>>> lines for capital gains, GnuCash wants to either apply the dollar amount
>>> that should be in the commodity account to Imbalance-USD if I tab
>>> repeatedly until I leave the transaction or to adjust the number of
>>> shares if I use a new line for the additional commodity currency amount.
>>> Does this only work if completely entered from scratch rather than
>>> edited in?
>> 
>> I've seen that during an edit. It usually "takes" on the second try: Just fix up the realized gains split and delete the imbalance-usd split.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>> 
>> 
> 
> Thanks John.  I have tried more than once to use tabs and so far it
> seems to not 'take', with one or the other of the two outcomes mentioned
> above.  I am using release 2.4.10-1 (or so I thought- the about screen
> says 'This copy was built from svn r22003 on 2012-02-11.') in Windows 7
> Pro.  I am trying an experiment in a fresh test file, and I hope to
> repeat the experiment in Ubuntu.  If I isolate the problem to this
> windows build, I will report that.

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The exact Gnucash version won't matter, that bit of code hasn't been touched lately. I'll be surprised if there's any difference between M$Win and Linux.

Um, maybe I misunderstood what you're doing... what do you mean by the "additional commodity currency amount"? I thought that we're talking about selling stock.

Here's what a completed transaction looks like:

This particular sale was of a mutual fund with reinvested dividends, so there was a combination of short-term and long term capital gains. 

You also mentioned that you were getting a split with the Imbalance-USD account. That should happen only if you save an unbalanced transaction -- as long as the edit stays open, the balancing split will have a blank account so that you can easily assign it:


If you fail to zero the price in the realized gain split, then go back and delete the price and shares *without closing the transaction edit*, Gnucash will do this:


If you close the transaction at this point, that bottom split will get assigned to Imbalance-USD:

Perhaps that's what you're seeing?

I just verified that when this happens you can just fix up the realized gain split (delete the price and re-enter the gain amount, tabbing out of the split) and delete the imbalance-USD split and all is well.

Regards,
John Ralls