[GNC] Mystery per-security Opening Balances accounts appearing

[Christopher Lam]

May be side effect from https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/762

On Thu, 18 Mar 2021, 11:09 am Robin Chattopadhyay, <robinraymn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I've been meaning to ask about this behavior too. I *think* it started
> sometime between version 4.1 and 4.4. It seems to me to happen when
> creating -- or editing -- an account that has a non-currency commodity. As
> Geoff said, it's a minor nuisance and I just delete the extra accounts when
> they appear.
>
> But I am curious about the use case that would necessitate this change.
> Unless creating a new set of books, I'm generally not going to offset an
> asset acquisition transaction against an opening balance account. But
> almost any editing of an account setup will trigger the creation of the
> Opening Balance account.
>
> And I'm not sure what the equity account is supposed to show. For example
> in the following test case:
> 1) Create an account with type STOCK. Opening Balance tab is greyed out.
> 2) The stock account and the Opening Balance accounts are created
> 3) Enter a transaction from the stock account, with a DR to the stock
> account and a CR to the Opening Balance account. Result shows the
> transaction in the stock account register as expected; but in the Opening
> Balance account register, the transaction is entered, but no value in
> either the DR or CR column
> 4) Enter a transaction from the Opening Balance account with a CR to the
> Opening Balance account and a DR to the stock account. Save the transaction
> and Gnucash displays the transfer dialog. Enter a price and save the
> transaction. Then the transaction appears as expected in both registers.
>
> I'm using the SQLite database, so in the transaction from Step 3, Opening
> Balance account split shows 0 in the quantity_num field, but the
> transaction in Step 4 shows the appropriate share value in quantity_num
> split on both sides of the transaction. Step 3 seems like a bug,
> notwithstanding the purpose of the Opening Balance account
>
> I'm using Gnucash 4.4 in Ubuntu 20.04 as a VM client on a Windows 10 host
> machine.
>
> On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 7:20 PM Geoff <cleanoutmyshed at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  > (1) Has anyone else seen this?
> >
> > Yes, you are not going crazy, I have had a similar problem on a few
> > occasions myself in the past month, however I can't put my finger on the
> > reason why or reproduce it.
> >
> > GnuCash 4.4 on Windows 10.
> >
> >
> >  > (2) What gives?
> >
> > No idea, I just deleted the accounts.  It's a minor nuisance.
> >
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Geoff
> > =====
> >
> > On 18/03/2021 4:00 am, peterb wrote:
> > > I've been using Gnucash for well over a year and a half.  Sometime
> within
> > > the past few months, I have seen a number of completely empty Opening
> > > Balances equity accounts opening themselves for certain securities
> that I
> > > own.  They are always denominated in the currency of the security; so
> for
> > > example I have one right now:
> > > [image: Screen Shot 2021-03-17 at 12.58.13 PM.png]
> > > These accounts have no balance, no transactions in them, and *to the
> best
> > > of my knowledge* have never had a transaction in them.
> > > I have asset accounts for about 75 securities, but only see this for
> > around
> > > 10 of my securities.  Most of them were acquired after starting to use
> > > GnuCash, so the top-level Equity:Opening-Balances account would not
> have
> > > been involved at all.
> > >
> > > (1) Has anyone else seen this?
> > > (2) What gives?
> > >
> > > Thanks!
> > >
> > > Peter
> > >
> > >
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