[GNC] Getting My Account To Trial Balance

[David Cousens]

Hugh,

When you are creating the transaction for the sale if you are using the
automated process as described in the Tutorial and Concepts Guide
(https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v3/C/gnucash-guide/index.html) section 9.7 on
selling shares Gnucash will automatically assign the profit/gain on the
transaction to either an Orphan_Gains_CCC (where CCC is the designator for
the currency the stock is in) if using the automated scrub facility or to
the Imbalance account if using the manual procedure described in Section
9.7. This is because GnuCash has no way of knowing what Income account you
may want to assign the profit/loss to so it uses these default accounts to
indicate that a transaction has a component which has not been assigned to a
specific account in your Chart of Accounts. Any entries which appear in the
Orphan or Imbalance accounts need to be reassigned to specific accounts as
there balances are only not zero when an accounting error/unassigned
transaction component has occurred. Their purpose is to highlight such
transactions for correction.

You have to reassign the amount that GnuCash has assigned to either of these
accounts  by default to an appropriate Income account you have set up for
recording  realized share gains and losses.  To do this if you open the
transaction in the Asset register which recorded the shares/security you
sold, (note I am working with the Auto-split ledger option set in the
Register defaults tab of the Edit preferences which opens and displays all
splits of a transaction). You will see the accounts that the various splits
of the transaction have been assigned to in a column to the right of the
screen befor the debits and credits to the accounts are listed. 

There should be three entries/splits for your transaction. The first will be
a credit to the asset account which recorded your ownership of the
securities for the value of the securities (normally the price you paid but
if you are an active trader it may be a calculation based on either a first
in-first out basis or a last-in first out basis where your sale covers
multiple lots of securities purchased at different times. The second will be
a debit to your Asset:bank account (or similar eg a brokerage account) which
will be for the amount for whichyou sold the securities. The third entry
will be to either the Imbalance account or an Orphan-Gains account with a
credit for the difference between the purchase and sale prices.

To reassign it, click on the Imbalance or Orphan Gains account and it will
open a drop down list from which you can select an Income account to which
you want to assign the profit. Something like Income:Securities or similar.
You may need to create an appropriate account under the Income top level
heading in your Accounts list if one doesn't exist already.

David Cousens.



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David Cousens
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