Hugh, When you are creating the transaction for the sale if you are using the automated process as described in the Tutorial and Concepts Guide (https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v3/C/gnucash-guide/index.html) section 9.7 on selling shares Gnucash will automatically assign the profit/gain on the transaction to either an Orphan_Gains_CCC (where CCC is the designator for the currency the stock is in) if using the automated scrub facility or to the Imbalance account if using the manual procedure described in Section 9.7. This is because GnuCash has no way of knowing what Income account you may want to assign the profit/loss to so it uses these default accounts to indicate that a transaction has a component which has not been assigned to a specific account in your Chart of Accounts. Any entries which appear in the Orphan or Imbalance accounts need to be reassigned to specific accounts as there balances are only not zero when an accounting error/unassigned transaction component has occurred. Their purpose is to highlight such transactions for correction.
You have to reassign the amount that GnuCash has assigned to either of these accounts by default to an appropriate Income account you have set up for recording realized share gains and losses. To do this if you open the transaction in the Asset register which recorded the shares/security you sold, (note I am working with the Auto-split ledger option set in the Register defaults tab of the Edit preferences which opens and displays all splits of a transaction). You will see the accounts that the various splits of the transaction have been assigned to in a column to the right of the screen befor the debits and credits to the accounts are listed. There should be three entries/splits for your transaction. The first will be a credit to the asset account which recorded your ownership of the securities for the value of the securities (normally the price you paid but if you are an active trader it may be a calculation based on either a first in-first out basis or a last-in first out basis where your sale covers multiple lots of securities purchased at different times. The second will be a debit to your Asset:bank account (or similar eg a brokerage account) which will be for the amount for whichyou sold the securities. The third entry will be to either the Imbalance account or an Orphan-Gains account with a credit for the difference between the purchase and sale prices. To reassign it, click on the Imbalance or Orphan Gains account and it will open a drop down list from which you can select an Income account to which you want to assign the profit. Something like Income:Securities or similar. You may need to create an appropriate account under the Income top level heading in your Accounts list if one doesn't exist already. David Cousens. ----- 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.