For anyone else's benefit, for old Stock accounts, I was relying on gnucash to re-value appreciated (or depreciated) stocks. This would affect my net worth on my personal balance sheet, but even when I closed out stocks by selling all shares, I was using neither lots/scrubbing nor manual entries for realized gains/losses, so of course my Trial Balance was not in balance. There isn't a really good tool (at least that I could find *inside *gnucash) to show me total realized gain or loss on a closed stock account throughout its life, but I was able to either eyeball it for the stocks with few entries or download the register to a spreadsheet program to then calculate the cumulative realized loss or gain, and I made manual entries on the last share sale date, and I have now (more or less) gotten rid of the trial balance issue and the phantom "unrealized loss" that I knew didn't really exist.
I'll probably continue to mostly track assets manually (since one generally has to make manual realized gain entries anyway, or learn more about scrubbing, which I just don't have the time or need to do right now), and if it ever really matters, I suppose I could export all the old stock registers and build some type of programmatic way to import back all the individual realized gains/losses, but I'm probably good enough for now, and at least understand what I did wrong. It does make sense now. Thank you. On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 9:12 AM David Warren <da...@warren1.net> wrote: > OK thank you. Sorry for bad form on my response. > > On Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 10:39 PM John Ralls <jra...@ceridwen.us> wrote: > >> >> > On Feb 27, 2025, at 16:47, David Warren <da...@warren1.net> wrote: >> > >> > John, >> > >> > I'm curious what you'd suggest to do to track my issue down. I got rid >> of all my stock accounts save one open one (where the price hasn't moved >> since inception) and some closed accounts (where all positions were sold). >> A standard balance sheet report nevertheless shows a giant "unrealized >> trading loss". Yet an advanced portfolio report (as expected, as I have no >> extant large unrealized losses) shows nothing of the sort. A trial balance >> report DOES show a large imbalance, though, (perhaps of the same amount), >> between debits and credits. >> > >> > How does one track down the account(s) producing this purported >> unrealized trading loss. (note that trading accounts are NOT enabled) >> > >> >> David, >> >> Please start a new email when you want to start a new conversation. It’s >> much friendlier to the thread-following in everyone’s’ mail clients and >> also makes searching the list archives easier. >> >> Look at different periods in the trial balance report. Try running one >> for 5 years ago. Was there an unrealized gain or loss? If so try 10 years >> ago; if not 3 years ago, and so on. If you find that the unrealized gain >> has accumulated over time then you’ll need to create post-dated >> transactions or correct existing ones to get it to balance as you go. If >> it’s just one broken transaction then binary-searching with the dates is >> the fastest way to find it. >> >> Regards, >> John Ralls >> >> _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
