[GNC] Commodities in Balance Sheet Report Missing Prices

[John Ralls]

You’re confusing AQBanking, which imports transactions in a variety of ways, with Finance::Quote, which retrieves prices/exchange rates.

If you can find a backup with the prices in it that will provide the quickest fix. There’s no price export so the simplest way to transfer the prices from the backup is to save the backup as a SQLite3 database. Then you can use the sqlite3 program to write the prices table out as a CSV that you can import into your main book with the CSV price importer.

The straight-up command line version would be 
  sqlite3 -csv myfile-db.gnucash “select * from Prices;” > prices.csv
If you’re using your Windows box for this you’d double-click Sqlite3.exe and tell it 
  > .mode csv
  > .once “c:/Users/Dave/prices.csv”
  > select * from Prices;
  > .system “c:/Users/Dave/prices.csv:
  
Full documentation at https://www.sqlite.org/cli.html#export_to_csv.

Failing the backup or if you need to fill in missing dateas I guess the most efficient way to get historical quotes is to use something like Yahoo! Finance to get the historical quotes and copy them into a spreadsheet then save the spreadsheet as a CSV and use File>Import>Import Prices from a CSV file. The intro screen to the import assistant has some instructions about what columns need to be in the CSV.

Regards,
John Ralls



> On Nov 10, 2025, at 12:35, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I remember using AQ banking to download prices (not in the last few years).  It has not even been configured in recent times after the AlphaVantage key got flakey. I also had off and on monthly rituals to manually add prices to the database for the last day of the month for a few securities when the markets were closed on the last calendar day of the month.  I am sure that I did not intentionally use the tool to remove old prices.  What I would do is work through the price editor and select non-month-end prices to manually remove.  Now that I am retired, I don't have enough free time to do that.  I do need to restore some for reports that I want to re-run.  
> 
> What tools are there to efficiently gather selected historical prices and import them?
> 
> Could prices disappear through some other mechanism?  I know that the report was never closed after I last ran it on November 2022 data several months ago and it had prices then, as well as for many previous months. It is the 11th  revision of that report to capture newly added securities from time to time.  I might be able to find three or even ten year old backups if I look hard enough.
> 
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2025 at 10:57 AM John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us <mailto:jralls at ceridwen.us>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> > On Nov 10, 2025, at 08:34, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com <mailto:david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> > 
>> > I am currently using the Windows Nightly Build 5.13 dated November 10, 2025.
>> > When I run a Balance Sheet Report or a custom report based on that report,
>> > Commodities that do not have a price dated on or before the report date
>> > that is visible in the Price Database are not given a value in the report.
>> > I use the Last up through report date price source because I am comparing
>> > the report with my broker's report.
>> > While the  Price Database has recent entries generated by purchase and sale
>> > transactions, for some reason sale and purchase prices before November 30,
>> > 2022 for some securities do not exist, even though I have been tracking
>> > those securities in GnuCash for over 10 years.
>> > 
>> > I believe that in the past either this price source selection method picked
>> > up prices from transaction history and did not need them to be duplicated
>> > in the Price Database, which may have prices purged accidentally or
>> > intentionally from time to time or perhaps the prices were always
>> > duplicated in the.Price Database and updated if a transaction was edited.
>> > 
>> > Do I need to file a bug report?
>> 
>> No, you need to put historical prices in your price database.
>> 
>> Report pricing is and has always been either price database (nearest in time, nearest in time before, latest) or transaction-based (average cost, weighted average cost). Transaction have written a price into the database since sometime around the v2.6. release. That’s probably what you’re thinking of. 
>> 
>> I think the only way to delete prices from the price database is to use the RemoveOlld button in the Price Database window. That opens another dialog that provides pretty fine-grained control over what prices to remove, so it would be hard to do it inadvertently. Might you have done that?
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> David Carlson