Assets with a negative value treated as zero in reports

[Ian Konen]

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 5:55 AM, Colin Bell <crb11 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> On 15/05/2013 19:59, Derek Atkins wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Colin Bell <crb11 at cam.ac.uk> writes:
>>
>>  When I do an Account Summary report, any asset I have with a negative
>>> value (such as an overdrawn bank account) is treated as having zero
>>> value. This seems to apply to all the Asset and Liability reports.
>>>
>>> I assume this behaviour is by design, although it seems broken to me.
>>>
>>> Is there an option to turn this off and get a correct balance sheet
>>> for my accounts?
>>>
>>
>> What does it mean to have a "Negative Asset"?  How can you have negative
>> cash in your wallet?  How could you have negative money in your checking
>> account?  And no, "overdraft" doesn't count, because that's yet another
>> account that would be a Liability that gets tied to your checking
>> account.
>>
>> If the asset account is negative then you should think about how to
>> record it as a Liability.
>>
>
> I assume this means the answer to my question is "no".
>
What I have is categories in my accounts which can either be an asset or a
> liability at different times. Buddha Buck gives a good example, an
> overdrawn bank account is another. A third one is that I lend my car to a
> work colleague, and want to record how much money she owes me currently.
> Most of the time this is positive, but sometimes negative (if she has
> filled up with petrol currently).
>
> I _could_ create duplicate Asset and Liability accounts to cover all these
> cases, and would have to if I was accounting to professional standards I
> assume, but for the purpose of my household accounts this is overkill and
> risks mistakes.
>
> Gnucash in any case works perfectly happily with negative assets except
> when you want to generate reports. I've been using it happily for years -
> but now I'm getting married and combining accounts with my fiancee, I need
> to start printing off reports for her, which I haven't done before.
>
> If we weren't meant to have negative assets, the program should prevent me
> from letting an Asset account go negative (or at least warn me!) and the
> documentation should make it clearer as well.
>

I'm not seeing the behavior you describe at all...I'm running GnuCash
2.4.11 (I guess 2.4.13 is out now but I haven't gotten to it yet) on
Windows 7 and the default account summary report I generate shows the
proper account balance for both assets and liabilities regardless of
whether they have an improperly signed balance (using parenthesis instead
of the negative sign, but otherwise as expected, and definitely never
incorrectly zeroed out).  Other reports like the balance sheet are also
handling negative balances correctly.

The account summary, and other related reports, are date sensitive with
"today" as the default value:  Perhaps you have withdrawal(s) in the
future, or otherwise posted after the report's date?  It is correct for the
report not to include future transactions, but you can also set the report
date to a future date to accommodate.

For the record, I don't see why standard accounting principals SHOULD
forbid negative asset balances and require an entirely new account to be
created when you overdraw your checking account or overpay your credit card
bill, but I'm not an accountant and I have learned to exercise some caution
distinguishing what I think SHOULD be the rule vs. what is the rule :-).
 Tax laws in particular do not treat assets and liabilities (or income and
expenses) as perfectly equal and opposite entities so calling your mortgage
an asset with a large negative balance probably would screw up any kind of
automated tax calculation.  A temporary situation like an overdraw (which
one presumes will be quickly corrected) seems like it should be fine to
leave as is, but I'm hedging a lot here.



> Thanks,
>
> Colin
>
>
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-- 
Ian Konen
iankonen at gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/iankonen
978-821-6498