[GNC] Balance sheet unusable for LANG="de..."; was: Bad account setup in Guide §12

Frank H. Ellenberger frank.h.ellenberger at gmail.com
Fri Apr 17 10:26:27 EDT 2020


David

Am 17.04.20 um 13:00 schrieb David Cousens:
> Frank 
> 
> In that case you should be concerned as the trading account balances are
> currently reported under equity in the Balance sheet.
> 
> The attached is a Balance sheet run on a dummy book I created
> Trading_Test_BalSheet.png
> <http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t375329/Trading_Test_BalSheet.png>  

Oh, that makes the balance sheet useless for german and probably other
users. Unrealized gains/losses do not belong in the balance. The user
has to manually enter value adjustments in the closing book process
according local law to reflect them, if applicable.

That was also the reason, why the trading accounts were not implemented
over a decade.

> The dummy book is attached as well
> Test_trading.gnucash
> <http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t375329/Test_trading.gnucash>  
> 
> The amount shown under Equity as trading losses is the sum of the balances
> of the trading accounts in AUD and USD expressed as AUD after a couple of
> dummy transfers from AUD->USD->AUD and USD_>AUD->USD with changes in the
> exchange rate between them. 
> 
> The IFRS and FASB both require trading gains/losses where trading is the
> main operation of the entity to be reported as Other Comprehensive Income
> whereas incidental trading  gains and losses where they are not main
> activity of the business are normally reported through normal profit and
> loss. The situation is different for companies and for individuals at least
> in Australia as individual's capital gains are taxed here at an individuals
> marginal tax rate (variable stepped scale depending on assessabletaxable
> income) whereas capital gains in companies are taxed at the company tax
> rate.
> 
> The IFRS is like most standards/legislation difficult to make sense of
> unless you have a glossary and the inital definitions etc all open at once.
> The Australia standards pretty well follow the IFRS but there will be some
> excpetions and the FASB is trying to converge on the IFRS and has apparently
> in this area. From what I can gather the HGB is also IFRS based but the
> question is how closely.

No, the base has been the german "Grundsätze ordnungsgemäßer
Buchführung" (GOB):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunds%C3%A4tze_ordnungsm%C3%A4%C3%9Figer_Buchf%C3%BChrung

But by several EU directives starting in 2002 (most parts of) IFRS
became obligatory for public traded companies.

But smaller companies (our users) still use the GOB part of HGB.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Financial_Reporting_Standards#Verbindlichkeit
and #Unterschiede_zu_nationalem_Recht

> Iy seems in most cases there are situations where
> it is reported in income and others where it is reported in equity. I will
> start sorting through the legisaltion and see if I can tabulate the
> requirements in a few major jurisdictions cf the IFRS requirements. Might
> take a while to do.  I can track down the Australian situation for companies
> fairly easily as my daughter is a company accountant and handles reporting
> on it all the time.
> 
> I seem to remember a lot of discussion fairly recently in the last couple of
> years when Chris was updating various reports in either the Dev or User
> forums. I'll track that down to see what light it sheds on the situation.

Yes, I did not watch changes on reports very closely.
As I do not know the rules in other countries, but Switzerland and
Austria have similar principles, a workaround might be to move the
pending results out of the balance (just as it was in the old report)
for LANG settings starting with "de".

> David
Frank


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