Thanks for your thoughts, Adrien.
Yes, I do have losses from changes in exchange rates between when I booked a
currency and the date of the report. However, these changes were tiny compared
to the "Unrealized Losses" figure that appeared in the Trial Balance report.
So, while I agree that this report shouldn't show virtual accounts, the bigger
question in my mind is, "Where did this number come from?" That's still a
mystery to me, but the use of multiple currencies is definitely a trigger. As
soon as I remove all transactions in a foreign currency, this line disappears
from the report.
About this rounding bug you described: are you sure this affects only the Trial
Balance report? I'm worried that this could cause a lot of other problems.
It sounds like I have to give up on putting foreign currency transactions in my
GnuCash books until these problems are fixed. I see your point that Trial
Balances should not be necessary, but I don't think I'm likely to get my
accountant to change her ways because GnuCash won't generate the reports she
wants, and I'm not quite ready to go looking for a new accountant!
Thanks,
Richard
----------------------------
On 22/3/18, 2:22 PM, "gnucash-user on behalf of Adrien Monteleone"
<gnucash-user-bounces+richardcd73=gmail....@gnucash.org on behalf of
adrien.montele...@gmail.com> wrote:
You might see unrealized losses with multiple currencies to account for the
change in value between the time you booked a currency and the date of the
report.
So if you converted some SGD to USD at some particular exchange rate, and
that rate has since changed (very likely) then you will either have a gain or
loss (depending on the direction of the change) that is yet unrealized because
you haven’t converted the USD back to SGD. If you did convert them back, the
loss or gain would be realized in the conversion transaction.
But I’m not sure why the report shows the unrealized figures at all. It
really doesn’t belong in there unless I don’t understand ’trial balance’
properly. It should be showing you the balance of ACTUAL accounts, not virtual
ones.
What’s worse, even without that figure, I also discovered that you can get
an imbalanced result here even if the value hasn’t changed. There is a rounding
bug that kicks in because the report takes the newer value based on a rounded
total of the foreign currency. But the asset account register for that currency
only rounds the display, not the actual figures. The cumulative effect can be a
gain/loss of several currency units over a 2 year period.(noted in that thread
you linked) So if you have multiple currencies, this report is most likely
going to be wrong.
Really, the report is not necessary any longer using computers instead of
paper books. The purpose of the trial balance is to check your books before you
close them. But you don’t need to close your books with Gnucash. If you are
closing, you want to make sure everything is correct because the process of
closing wipes out some accounts back to zero, effectively ‘erasing’ their
history. (or rather, fixing their history as a single end-of-period figure,
rather than individual transactions) In the days of paper, this was necessary
as part of the process of creating the basic financial statements. But with
Gnucash, you don’t need to close the books in order to generate those financial
statements. (Income Statement, Balance Sheet, etc.) You can generate those
reports at any time.
Regards,
Adrien
> On Mar 22, 2018, at 1:02 AM, Richard <richardc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi there,
>
>
>
> I’ve been using GnuCash for about a year to run a small business in
Singapore. I’m thrilled that it has worked so well, since I have no accounting
experience, but I’m trying to create a Trial Balance report for my accountant,
and I can’t get it to work right. At the bottom of the report there is a line
showing “Unrealized Losses” of S$230.42, which seems to have come out of
nowhere. Note that this line does not correspond to any account, but is
something that the report has automatically added, and it is causing a mismatch
between Debits and Credits. Does anyone know why a Trial Balance report would
show a line like this? Is this a bug? I saw the following conversation on
gnucash-dev that seems to be discussing something similar, but I’m not sure.
>
>
>
>
http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Re-trial-balance-how-to-find-mismatch-question-td4697393i20.html
>
>
>
> There are a few other things to note about my situation. First, I should
say that I’m running GnuCash 2.6.19 on Mac OS 10.13.3. Second, I have no
investment accounts or stocks in this set of accounts, so I don’t have any
unrealized losses due to that. Finally, I am using two currencies (USD and
SGD), and I do have a small loss (of S$3.58 I think) that I have not yet
accounted for. I saw mention of multiple currencies in the thread I linked to
above. Could this be causing the problem?
>
>
>
> Thanks for any help or advice. I’m hoping to get around this problem and
close my books for 2017.
>
> -Richard
>
>
>
> ----------------------------
>
> Richard
>
> richardc...@gmail.com
>
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