Long I found that setting up the transfers makes a lot more sense using the toolbar Transfer icon or the Menu->Actions->Transfer as you are more easily able to setup the debits, credits and the accounts and the exchange rate seems to work a bit more naturally and uses a different dialog
I was then able to create a trading account balance with a transfer to USD and back at a slightly different exchange rate, in my case a loss of 0.26 which showed up as Trading Losses in the Balance Sheet. I think the Trading accounts are protected against manual transaction entries to them deliberately. The values in them will automatically be recorded in the Balance Sheet as Trading Gains or Losses and my guess is they are recorded in the book currency in the Balance sheet. If you then create an Income Statement report the trading account balances will then show up in that as Realized Gains and Losses. It does work! I'll try and do the 5.1 table exercise later. GnucCash can be used in two ways. Accountants traditionally when using pen and paper physically closed the book and created a new physical set of books at the end of each accounting procedure. They used a close books procedure in which one of the steps would have been to adjust any residual unrealized gains to the actual gain during the recording of the sale and then transfer the actual gain and loss to a Realized gains and Losses Account. GnuCash can be operated in this manner with trading accounts turned off but you have to manually generate all the entries and use a close books process to transfer the income and expense account balance to an Equity:Retained earnings account. Because all of the data exists and can be easily manipulated in a program, GnuCash can also be used in a mode where you dont carry out any close books procedure and the program automatically calculates the balances for unrealized gains and losses and includes them appropriately labelled in the Balance Sheet and Income Statement (and other reports as appropriate). There was some discussion a year or two ago about unrealized gains and how they appeared in the balance sheet in either the DEV forum or the User forum. Chris Lam was doing a rewrite and updating the user reports and creating a lot of new reports at the time. There was a lot of effort to ensure the reports were compatible with both ways of using GnuCash. If you search back through the archives you might find that thread. David ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
