Price editor unbalances accounts

Keith Bellairs keith at bellairs.org
Tue Sep 5 10:53:29 EDT 2017


Been a gnucash user for years and never understood what Most Recent meant.
BS w/ most recent shows my accounts to be almost in balance.

Thanks,

Keith



On Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 12:04 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

>
>
> > On Sep 4, 2017, at 7:43 PM, Keith Bellairs <keith at bellairs.org> wrote:
> >
> > The price editor makes unbalanced entries in my accounts by increasing
> (or
> > decreasing) the value of securities without the needed balancing entry to
> > income. In US tax terms the gain (loss) is an "unrealized" gain (loss) so
> > there's no need to pay tax on it, so some people might not want it show
> up
> > as income.  But I would really like it if my trial balance actually
> > balanced.
> >
> > Has anyone looked at this "problem"?
>
> No, the Price Editor doesn’t do anything at all to your accounts. The
> Accounts page shows the value of your securities according to the latest
> prices in the price database, but if you look at the account registers
> you’ll see that there’s no transaction that reflects price changes.
>
> When you run reports you can select what price to apply to assets.
> “Nearest in time” will generally cause the report to show “book value” with
> no unrealized gains or losses; “Most Recent” will price assets at the most
> recent price found in the price database. The other two, “Average Cost” and
> “Weighted Average” use averages of the prices actually paid for the
> non-default-currency assets but average all purchases in different ways.
>
> If you actually want to book unrealized gains (and unless a
> certified/chartered accountant tells you that you do, you don’t) you must
> create the transactions yourself.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
>


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