Accounts in multiple currencies

[Nathan.Watson-Haigh at csiro.au]

I started using GNUCash in England, and as such had most accounts set up in GNUCash in GBP currency. However, I've recently move to Australia and have some accounts set up using AUD currency. I was wondering if anyone has experience dealing with accounts in multiple currencies and if they have any advice on how best to handle them.

In particular, most of my expense accounts are in GBP, but now that I'm in Australia, and have a bank account in AUD, whenever I make charges to my AUD bank account, I enter the details in GNUCash as an expense (expense account in GBP). This expense has an "exchange rate" associated with it. However, an exchange rate doesn't really mean anything unless you really are moving money between two currencies. Therefore, if I use the Price Editor to retrieve up-to-date quotes on currency exchange rates my normal fortnightly salary in Australia looks like it's decreasing in reports due to the recent increase in the GBP->AUD exchange rate. Is there a better way to deal with multiple currencies, other than maybe creating a sub account in AUD for each expense account?

In addition, this is further complicated in the budget facility as it doesn't allow the budget to be specified in a particular currency, but rather is fixed to the currency of specified by each account. Thus, fluctuations in the exchange rate have an implied impact on whether I'm under/over budget.

I suppose, my point is that expenses are all relative to my current earning which is in AUD at the moment and exchange rates are not important in this respect

Cheers, and thanks for any comments/info/thoughts/points of view you may be able to provide.
Nathan


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Dr. Nathan S. Watson-Haigh
OCE Post Doctoral Fellow
CSIRO Livestock Industries
J M Rendel Laboratory
Rockhampton
QLD 4701
Australia

Tel: +61 (0)7 4923 8121
Fax: +61 (0)7 4923 8222
Web: http://www.csiro.au/people/Nathan.Watson-Haigh.html
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