GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 91661
Balance Sheet does not balance w/ Stock trades
Last modified: 2018-06-29 20:16:26 UTC
Balance Sheet report generates without error messages but does not balance. Assets are greater than Liabilities & Equity by twice the amount of one of the Exchange Account transactions. Exchange Account was set up (following instructions on 'How to set up a foreign-currency account' in help file) to record purchases of USD-denominated securities with CAD. P.S. I'm new to GnuCash so it may just be user error, but I don't understand why a double-entry bookkeeping system should be out of balance. I really like the program though. Thanks for not forcing a 'fill-out-a-cheque' user interface for data entry.
We need some more particulars to be able to replicate this. If you could provide a test example of a few transactions this would help a bunch. Thanks!
*** Bug 92829 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
You can find a more precise description of the bug, and how to reproduce it, in the #92829 bug report.
Fabien, Your description does not balance because you haven't accounted properly for the income you got from selling the stock. The extra $200 you got is income from the sale and in your example the balance sheet is just showing that you haven't properly shown this. I wanted a more specific example from this person as I saw this in your example.
I read the documentation carefully. I thought about the problem carefully. My conclusion is that I cannot see how I can account for the income part of the selling of the stock. The selling is automatically credited on the banking account, and nothing can be changed once the price and shares are fixed. The documentation describe how to deal with income and loss due to capital gain or depreciation, but it is about simple asset account such as cars, houses and so. The documentation seems to lack a "commodity income or loss" section... So I maintain this is a bug of the balance sheet report, till further information;-)
Fabien has provided additional comments; reopening.
Eliajah please dont mess with bugs when you dont understand the problem.
*** Bug 102046 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
There has been a giantic discussion of this issue on gnucash-devel; see for example here http://www.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2003-January/008106.html Current Status: Gnucash 1.6.x and 1.7.x does not have a general implementation of the correct accounting of realized gains/losses with stock trades. (Let alone that "correct accounting" in this context is definitely non-trivial.) Browse through the gnucash-devel discussion to find out about workarounds with current gnucash. I think it was proposed to add another transaction from your stock account to some income:Realized-Gain account, but with 0 stocks in the stock account, and with the difference amount of buying and selling total amount in the income account. Plans: Later in the 1.8.x cycle you can expect a fully general implementation to record realized gains/losses (using "lots"), but it will take some time to finish it.
*** Bug 169946 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
bug#169946 has a test file.
Move RFEs to version unspecified.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 131623 ***
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