User Support Forum

Hello, Neal.

I understand the Unrealized Gains account mechanics, and we've been doing that for some years. The problem now is that we have separated the underlying investments both at the Broker and in PowerChurch. We had been adjusting the unrealized gain/loss as a total value once at year end for the entire investment account. And we've been ignoring reinvested dividend, brokers fees, or anything else that affected the year-end number. We just plugged in the amount that netted correctly and closed out the year.

The puzzle is this: How do I reset the values of the original investments for each of our Funds? What I think I need is a sort of 'brute force' method to get true numbers in PC on the balance sheet that match the Broker's statements at year-end. I almost want to 'net out' the number each Fund 'ought' to show and add or subtract the difference from the Equity account to force the right number. Its really the same question that wasn't answered in an earlier post: why not 'reset' the account equity value at the beginning of each year? Or in accounting vocabulary; because the Church isn't liable for taxes on this income or this realized gains, couldn't one ratchet the basis up or down (loss or gain) each year to the true beginning balance and simplify the equation every month or quarter? At the very least, I need to do this once now.

Mark Mediary wrote:Hello, Neal.

I understand the Unrealized Gains account mechanics, and we've been doing that for some years. The problem now is that we have separated the underlying investments both at the Broker and in PowerChurch. We had been adjusting the unrealized gain/loss as a total value once at year end for the entire investment account. And we've been ignoring reinvested dividend, brokers fees, or anything else that affected the year-end number. We just plugged in the amount that netted correctly and closed out the year.

The puzzle is this: How do I reset the values of the original investments for each of our Funds? What I think I need is a sort of 'brute force' method to get true numbers in PC on the balance sheet that match the Broker's statements at year-end. I almost want to 'net out' the number each Fund 'ought' to show and add or subtract the difference from the Equity account to force the right number. Its really the same question that wasn't answered in an earlier post: why not 'reset' the account equity value at the beginning of each year? Or in accounting vocabulary; because the Church isn't liable for taxes on this income or this realized gains, couldn't one ratchet the basis up or down (loss or gain) each year to the true beginning balance and simplify the equation every month or quarter? At the very least, I need to do this once now.

OK .. so from what I'm reading, you had a Powerchurch investment account which was basically the total of all the original investments, and an unrealized gains/loss account which totaled all the gains/losses on all investments. If that is correct, then what you need to do is this:

I'm going to assume that you have already created the individual investment accounts.
What you want to do is move the funds from the consolidated account, to the individual accounts. I'm going to assume that at the end of Dec, you updated the consolidated account with the end of year gains/losses, so that the total shown in the account equals what the year end statements from each investment shows.

So .. you have the consolidated account 01-1330-000 Consolidated Mutual Fund totaling 120,000.00 with an associated Gain/Loss account of 01-1335-000 with 20,000.00, totaling 140,000. This total includes original investment amount (principle) along with the gains/losses. You want to then move the funds to the individual investments, 90,000 to one (01-1400-000), 50,000 to another (01-1500-000)

This is easy, and would look like this:

01-1330-000 CR 90000.00
01-1400-000 DB 90000.00

Then
01-1330-000 CR 30000.00
01-1335-000 CR 20000.00
01-1500-000 DB 50000.000

This moves the funds. As to why you don't just combine at the end of the year. Really it doesn't matter. On the balance sheet if you have each investment setup under its own LEVEL 4 group, each investment's initial investment and gain/loss account would display with its own total of both.

Nothing says you can't combine, its up to you.