[GNC] Transaction Report Sign Reverses

David T. sunfish62 at yahoo.com
Mon Aug 12 01:00:32 EDT 2019


Hello,

I am trying to create a YTD Capital Gains report, and am encountering a 
problem with how the Transaction Report implements the Sign Reverses 
setting.

I recall some time back a discussion about the fact that the Sign 
Reverses setting reverses signs in these reports in a confusing way. 
There was some discussion about reversing the individual transactions 
but not the totals. Although I do not recall the specifics of the 
discussion, I am encountering the same situation now, where the 
transactions themselves respect the user setting, but the totals do not. 
To say this is confusing is an understatement.

It seems to me that other financial applications must have encountered 
the problem of displaying income to users as a positive value (since 
that is how most of us view income!) while still finding a way to 
display the correct accounting information.

To display my YTD report of Capital Gains, I ran a Transaction Report 
and selected the Income:Realized Gains accounts for the current year. 
The result shows losses as positive numbers, and gains as negative. I 
don't know about you, but my expectation is reversed from this. If I 
change the Sign Reverses setting to Income and Expense, then the 
transactions switch, but the totals do not. This result was the gist of 
the discussion in an earlier thread. Bleah!

Now, I know that I can copy the data, paste it into another program and 
change all the settings to my heart's content, but I am looking for a 
way to run a report in GnuCash that directly and unambiguously shows me 
whether I have gained money (a positive) or lost it (a negative) over 
the current year. Does anyone have suggestions?

FWIW, I attempted to turn this report around and have a report that 
lists transactions in the asset accounts, filtered by the 
Income:Realized Gains accounts, but that seems to report only the Asset 
account currency--in this case, the mutual fund or stock shares involved 
on the Gain/Loss transaction. Unfortunately, that's not the actual 
Gain/Loss value...

It would be nice if the sign reverses setting could be fixed. Barring 
that, does anyone have a workaround report setup that can give me a 
sensible YTD Capital Gains total as described?

David T.



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