Accounting transaction to realize currency gain as income in the period? |WAS >> Re: Understanding the Balance Sheet - Unrealized Gain?

[Derek Atkins]

bunk3m <bunk3m at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi all.
>
> I think I understand the unrealized gain now ... sort of. 
>
> So how does one go about doing the double accounting entry to realize
> the gain as income in the period? 

you don't -- it's unrealized.  It's not income until you realize the
gain by "selling" (trading) the asset.

> If I can't easily find the transactions that make up the unrealized
> gain/loss, I would need to do a clearing entry of the aggregate
> somehow.   So I can create half of the transaction by creating a revenue
> item called Currency Gain/Loss.  But what would the other side of that
> transaction be? 
>
> I'm not an accountant so perhaps this is intuitively obvious for the
> accounting folks. 
>
> I suspect this is something to do with the currency asset value but I
> got rid of all the last of the foreign currency and now have a zero
> balance in that account. 

Did you account for the gain/loss when you traded those foreign-currency
assets?

> Thanks again for everyone's help.
>
> Cheers!
> B.

-derek

> On 22.03.2013 10:42 , Derek Atkins wrote:
>> Nope, the Unrealized Gain is literally a change-in-value of an asset
>> due to a change in price (exchange rate).
>> -derek 
>
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-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available