On 16/02/2018 08:20, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
At least on my version of the Trial Balance report, there is no ‘Imbalance
entry’ specifically.
There is at the bottom, the Imbalance-XXX and Orphan-XXX accounts listed along
with the others.
There is also a line for ‘Unrealized Gains’ or ‘Unrealized Losses’ (I have the
latter, even though the report duration was a single day with no price changes,
I gave up trying to figure that one out)
The ‘imbalance’ I’m speaking of trying to resolve, or at least finally attributed
to a rounding error with the XAG account, was simply the difference between what
the report shows as Total Debits & Total Credits. (note, these aren’t labeled
as such on the report - but they appear at the bottom, and that’s clearly what they
are) There is no figure on the report that shows this difference. I had to
calculate it manually. When I decided to audit the report for each account is when
I found the foreign currency account out of whack. The remaining difference was
attributable entirely to the ‘unrealized losses’ line.
So, the full difference between debits and credits is the SUM of the
‘Unrealized Gains/Losses’ line and the discrepancy due to rounding.
At least in my case.
I'm liking your approach to things, AdrienM. So try this:
Make a copy of your book for safe keeping.
Go to File / Properties and if it is ticked (checked in american) untick
it, my guess is it will be unticked (unchecked) so you will be about to
enter the world of trading accounts.
I love them for what they do and since there is a discussion in another
thread about naming things like the General Ledger or Journal, think
"Trading accounts" is a bad name. Who cares about a word? Welcome to
some marvellous accounting :)
Onwards.
Close your book and open it again
Actions / Check & repair. [1]
[1] if you are using business accounts you might need to run Check &
repair on individual accounts as there was a problem there and I can't
recall exactly if it has been fixed or not, but no harm done in double
checking. You only need to do this extra step for accounts that have a
type of A/Receivable or A/Payable, my understanding is all other
accounts are covered by the general check.
You should now have an extra top level account called Trading [2]
[2] it is badly named (but I think people that use it are used to the
name now) and arguably badly positioned in the account tree as it
belongs in Equity in accounting terms so keep that in mind.
Open the Trading account and explore a bit. All the differences you
were wondering about should be there and you should be able to delete
the Imbalance, Orphan, et al accounts as they should be empty unless you
really have entered an imbalanced tx <-- everyone makes a mistake sometimes.
So there are two problems with the report:
1) There should be no losses or gains if there were no trading transactions.
Certainly, this is impossible if there is only one day on the range of the
report and the price is the same. If all you have are opening entries and you
attempt to run a trial balance for that same day, you can’t have either a gain
or a loss, unrealized or not.
Watch out for the use of the word "trading" it is idiosyncratic in gnc.
2) Because the Equity:Opening Balances account is the result of rounded figures
for each entry in a foreign currency, the report’s method of taking the foreign
currency ending balance as of a date and doing the exchange rate calculation at
the end, will always produce a discrepancy. The report would have to sum the
book-default currency amounts individually or somehow a book-default currency
balance would have to be maintained and that used instead. Alternatively, a
foreign currency account could use the same precision as the foreign currency
itself, thus removing the potential for rounding errors if not eliminating them.
I think I have already answered this [3] but live multi-commodity TB
work is not for the faint hearted and generally isn't necessary unless
someone has taken a position on the movement of currencies or
commodities against each other and is making it their business.
[3] it may have been modded, I don't double check unless it is obvious
something hasn't got through.
Possibly, increasing the decimal places and re-entering the transactions for
the XAG account might resolve the rounding issue. (only because now the USD
amounts sum correctly to match since they don’t round enough) But then ALL USD
accounts would have this extra precision which is not desirable generally.
Try Trading accounts before that weirdness.
The alternative would be to reduce the precision of the XAG account, but again,
that is undesirable for accurate tracking of ownership quantities of the actual
metal. (or currency if that’s the case)
As above, this is what Trading accounts are for.
The per-account precision setting seems to only affect the default currency for
that account, in this case, XAG, not USD, which seems only to be controlled by
the book setting.
The whole point of Trading accounts is that the units, decimals, etc can
be arbitrary.
It is a way of recording differences.
Try it, you might like it :)
A: If you don't like it let us know anyway as I think we know it isn't
presented well. I'm thinking you are one of the people that might
understand them whereas many single commodity people (aka dumb
americans) don't.
--
Wm
Never vote for a man that wants to be your leader until he dies.
Particularly if his wife thinks it is a bad idea. And his son-in-law
has had his security clearance down graded.
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