"Unrealized Losses" in Trial Balance Report

[Adrien Monteleone]

You might see unrealized losses with multiple currencies to account for the change in value between the time you booked a currency and the date of the report.

So if you converted some SGD to USD at some particular exchange rate, and that rate has since changed (very likely) then you will either have a gain or loss (depending on the direction of the change) that is yet unrealized because you haven’t converted the USD back to SGD. If you did convert them back, the loss or gain would be realized in the conversion transaction.

But I’m not sure why the report shows the unrealized figures at all. It really doesn’t belong in there unless I don’t understand ’trial balance’ properly. It should be showing you the balance of ACTUAL accounts, not virtual ones.

What’s worse, even without that figure, I also discovered that you can get an imbalanced result here even if the value hasn’t changed. There is a rounding bug that kicks in because the report takes the newer value based on a rounded total of the foreign currency. But the asset account register for that currency only rounds the display, not the actual figures. The cumulative effect can be a gain/loss of several currency units over a 2 year period.(noted in that thread you linked) So if you have multiple currencies, this report is most likely going to be wrong.

Really, the report is not necessary any longer using computers instead of paper books. The purpose of the trial balance is to check your books before you close them. But you don’t need to close your books with Gnucash. If you are closing, you want to make sure everything is correct because the process of closing wipes out some accounts back to zero, effectively ‘erasing’ their history. (or rather, fixing their history as a single end-of-period figure, rather than individual transactions) In the days of paper, this was necessary as part of the process of creating the basic financial statements. But with Gnucash, you don’t need to close the books in order to generate those financial statements. (Income Statement, Balance Sheet, etc.) You can generate those reports at any time.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Mar 22, 2018, at 1:02 AM, Richard <richardcd73 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> 
> 
> I’ve been using GnuCash for about a year to run a small business in Singapore. I’m thrilled that it has worked so well, since I have no accounting experience, but I’m trying to create a Trial Balance report for my accountant, and I can’t get it to work right. At the bottom of the report there is  a line showing “Unrealized Losses” of S$230.42, which seems to have come out of nowhere. Note that this line does not correspond to any account, but is something that the report has automatically added, and it is causing a mismatch between Debits and Credits. Does anyone know why a Trial Balance report would show a line like this? Is this a bug? I saw the following conversation on gnucash-dev that seems to be discussing something similar, but I’m not sure.
> 
> 
> 
> http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Re-trial-balance-how-to-find-mismatch-question-td4697393i20.html
> 
> 
> 
> There are a few other things to note about my situation. First, I should say that I’m running GnuCash 2.6.19 on Mac OS 10.13.3. Second, I have no investment accounts or stocks in this set of accounts, so I don’t have any unrealized losses due to that. Finally, I am using two currencies (USD and SGD), and I do have a small loss (of S$3.58 I think) that I have not yet accounted for. I saw mention of multiple currencies in the thread I linked to above. Could this be causing the problem?
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks for any help or advice. I’m hoping to get around this problem and close my books for 2017.
> 
> -Richard 
> 
> 
> 
> ----------------------------
> 
> Richard 
> 
> richardcd73 at gmail.com
> 
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