Assets with a negative value treated as zero in reports

[David Carlson]

On 5/16/2013 10:01 AM, Ian Konen wrote:
> 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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>
>
Colin,

Which reports are incorrectly showing zero values, and in which
accounts?  Are these commodity or foreign  currency based accounts that
are not correctly valued due to stale or missing conversion values?  If
so, then there is a way to change the options and/or data to make the
values appear. If not, then as Derek asked, please tell us which
report(s) are misbehaving.

David C