Unrealized Gains in Balance sheet wildly out of proportion

[Wm]

Sat, 9 May 2015 17:46:32 
<CAHKUnFdBRwtvG9F04CV60YtRnWaVbGmTu=+kjSo6oeoGj+FfQw at mail.gmail.com> 
Jobjörn Folkesson <jobjorn at jobjorn.se>

>First of all thank you for the software. I often recommend it to local
>chapters of the non-profit organisation I work for, and I use it myself
>both for my private economy and for smaller non-profit associations whose
>books I keep.
>
>With my own money I sometimes travel abroad and thus introduce foreign
>currencies to my GnuCash file. This works fine, except for one detail.
>According to my balance sheet I have unrealized gains of 6,7 million SEK,
>which is more than 20 times more than my total assets. A screenshot is
>attached.
>
>I have googled a bit and read part of a discussion on this list from 2008,
>but alas I can't understand what is going on. I am running GnuCash 2.6.4 on
>Debian stable (jessie), so my copy was built from rev 29bcdf1+ on
>2014-11-15. Does anyone know if it is something I can fix?

GBP / SEK looks most wrong.

Try some things for us first.

gnc has two balance sheets, run them both again making sure
Price source is Nearest in Time
choose Today as the bal sheet date.
and ensure
Show Foreign Currencies tick / check / Swedish equivalent (tak?)
Show Exchange Rates tick / ditto

Now you should have numbers you can make sense of with a calculator in 
your hand.

If things are still looking very wrong compare the exchange rates on the 
bal sheets with those on your favourite exchange, if you want quick and 
easy just type "gbp.06 in sek" into google, it works and should be 
around .8 krowns, but you probably already know that!

If the exchange rates are way out you should fix them by going through 
the transactions again to get more realistic rates attached to the 
actual transactions.  If you don't have much in the way of non-SEK you 
don't necessarily need to get up to date prices.

In this case I'm guessing there has been a more basic mistake like so 
much of this currency ended up as so much of another and a decimal was 
wrong or something.

Regards what DavidC said I am in favour of people using Trading Accounts 
if they are going to be dealing with "strange money" more than once a 
year.  That "strange" includes all sorts of financial instruments other 
than currencies.

Anyway, I'm sure David and I would both like to help you so see what 
you've got after you try out the recipe above.

-- 
Wm...