[GNC] Commodities in Balance Sheet Report Missing Prices

[David Carlson]

It turns out that I didn't have to look far for a backup with the full
price histories.  They were only lost somehow in my transition to the
release 5 series of GnuCash which started a few months ago.  I will try
your suggestion to use sqlite if I can make that work in my old 4.8 version.

On Mon, Nov 10, 2025 at 3:47 PM John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

> 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> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> > On Nov 10, 2025, at 08:34, David Carlson <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
>
>
>

-- 
David Carlson