Question about multiple currencies

Tue Oct 28 14:03:06 EDT 2008

I thought you might like to read the comments by my accountant as
follows:

I am making good progress with the accounts.

There are a number of major issues with Gnucash.  Because the company
is 
small with relatively few transactions these can be overcome, but often 
by cutting and pasting to Excel and then sorting the issue from there. 
This would not be feasible if the company had a lot of transactions.

When preparing accounts from accounting software, the principal reports 
that us accountants work from are the trial balance and the nominal 
(general) ledger.  Effectively the trial balance is the index page and 
the nominal ledger lists the individual transactions that make up each 
account on the trial balance.

I have tinkered with Gnucash considerably and seem to have run into the 
following issues: -

1. Reports generally cannot be exported to Excel or any other useful 
formats.  Wouldn't matter except the reports given are largely fixed
and 
cannot be modified very much.

2. The general ledger report lists the individual accounts in a 
different order to the trial balance.

3. Foreign currency accounts - for example the sales account USD
Xi-Test 
Licence sales shows as £8,020.38 on the trial balance but £10,238.05 on 
the general ledger.  This is the same for all the others.  Clearly the 
trial balance deals with currency conversion differently to the general 
ledger. Consequently I cannot see what makes up £8,020.38 on the trial 
balance.

4. When running an aged creditors (aged payables) report, you cannot go 
back and see what the position was on a particular day, i.e. suppliers 
owed as at 30 September 2008.  Although it looks possible, when you run 
the report it excludes any amounts that have subsequently been paid.

This was not a major problem as the only amount in question was a 
Vodaphone bill which was easy to identify.  However if there were 100 
supplier accounts on the ledger it would be near impossible to resolve 
and would mean literally running the report on the day, or the info is 
lost.

5. On the general ledger,  income and liability accounts are shown back 
to front, i.e. income and liabilities in the debit column.

On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 03:44 -0300, Peter Selinger wrote:

> Hi Mike,
> 
> thanks for writing. I haven't been reading the gnucash lists for a
> while.
> 
> As it happens, someone else asked me about realized and unrealized
> gains a few months ago, and I had been considering adding a section on
> this to my page.
> 
> I took your message as a prompt to finally do so. See the new section
> 4.5 at http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/
> 
> It hasn't been carefully proof-read yet, so there might be some
> typos. The content should make sense though. 
> 
> Mike Alexander wrote:
> > 
> > ---------- Forwarded Message ----------
> > Date: October 20, 2008 12:26:21 PM -0400
> > From: Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU>
> > To: John M Collins <jmc at xisl.com>
> > CC: Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu>, gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> > Subject: Re: Question about multiple currencies
> > 
> > > I have one major issue with Peter's page -- he conflated Realized and
> > > Unrealized gains/losses and never really talks about the difference
> > > between them and when/how you should compute/account for one vs the
> > > other.  But I agree that the rest of his document is spot on, but 
> > this
> > > one issues is IMHO a major flaw in his thesis.
> > >
> > > -derek
> > >
> > > John M Collins <jmc at xisl.com> writes:
> > >
> > >> Yes indeed - I think that Peter Selinger's page is exactly on point.
> > >>
> > >> On Sat, 2008-10-18 at 00:37 -0400, Mike Alexander wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> --On October 15, 2008 3:38:02 PM +0100 John M Collins
> > >>> <jmc at xisl.com>  wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>> > Further to my previous message of this morning I tried deleting
> > >>> > all the "offending" transactions and then when I run "trial
> > >>> > balance" I get this at the bottom of it:
> > >>> >
> > >>> > Unrealized Gains
> > >>> >                     £
> > >>> >
> > >>> >
> > >>> >                       £
> > >>> >              £919,651.64
> > >>> >
> > >>> > Any idea what is going on?
> > >>> >
> > >>> > And how do I "repair" the accounts?
> > >>> >
> > >>> > (I did run check and repair all but it made no difference).
> > >>> >
> > >>> > Thanks for any help anyone can give.
> > >>>
> > >>> You might want to take a look at
> > >>> <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=537476> and
> > >>> <http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/gnucash.html> to
> > >>> see  if they are related to your problem.
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> John Collins Xi Software Ltd www.xisl.com
> > >>
> > >> Tel: +44 (0)1707 886110 (Direct)
> > >>      +44 (0)7799 113162 (Mobile)
> > >>
> > >> Registered in England & Wales Company Number 1977148 VAT: GB 403
> > >> 9239 64
> > >>
> > >> Trading Address: 3 Mandeville Rise, Welwyn Garden City, Herts, AL8
> > >> 7JT, UK
> > >> Reg Office: 2 Mill Road, Haverhill, Suffolk, CB9 8BD, UK
> > >> _______________________________________________
> > >> gnucash-user mailing list
> > >> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> > >> 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.
> > >
> > > --
> > >        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
> > >        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
> > >        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
> > >        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
> > >
> > >
> > 
> > ---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
> > 
> > 

John Collins Xi Software Ltd www.xisl.com

Tel: +44 (0)1707 886110 (Direct)
     +44 (0)7799 113162 (Mobile)

Registered in England & Wales Company Number 1977148 VAT: GB 403 9239 64

Trading Address: 3 Mandeville Rise, Welwyn Garden City, Herts, AL8 7JT,
UK
Reg Office: 2 Mill Road, Haverhill, Suffolk, CB9 8BD, UK