EURO-Stock and DM-Account / VAT

[Klaus Ridder]

Thank you very much for your reply!

> > 1.) EURO-Stock and DM-Account:
> > I have a mutual fund ("Wertpapierdepot") in EURO, and an Account in DM.
> > (This is still standard in Germany). When I now want to buy shares, I
> > cannot book this to my DM-Account. Is there any solution?
>
> Other developers please correct me, but that's what I know:
>
> At the moment EURO and DEM are considered as totally different currencies,
> at least when you try to transfer money. The current way of transferring
> money would be to have another currency account which "exchanges" the
> money between DEM and EURO. However, those two currencies have a fixed
> exchange rate which is not appropriately represented right now. Where
> should we start changing? Add currency accounts with a fixed exchange
> rate? Exchange EURO currencies on-the-fly?

In fact, "DM" doesn't really exist any more. Since 1999, the currency of
europe is "Euro". DM ist only a representation of Euro, as there is no
"real" Euro money yet: 1,95583 DM is 1 Euro. So it would be absolutely great
if I could make direct transactions between EUR, DM; ATS, FFR, ... Accounts.

> Or should we just say "You won't have that problem (fixed exchange rates)
> anymore after Jan 1st, 2002, so we just ignore it for the remaining 8
> months of 2001?"

Well, at least I am doing my whole business stuff for 2000 at the moment
with gnucash; and there the feature would be more than great. And the
problem will remain in the future: what if I boght someting in 2000 (booked
as "property") and sell it in 2006 ?

The problem will also be that I want to continue using my expense accounts
after 2002 (which are now in DM).

I have made myself some thoughts about the EUR-Problems, and read the
articles in the archive of this list about it.
the problem is: The user will want to see old transactions in both DM (as
they are printed on their monthly statements) and in Euro ("was the washing
machine in 2000 cheaper than the one I bought in 2002 ?)

In my opinion, the best solution would be that the user can swith the view
of every account From "EUR" to the prior currency (e.g. DM) with a button on
the top with can click and unclick:

A conversion tool is provided, which converts all Accounts to EUR which take
part in the Euro (DM, ATS, ...).
If this is possible with the engine, it would be best to store these
"calculated amounts" withs 4 digits (x.xxxx EUR), but 2 digits are also OK,
as everything will be correctly rounded:
(1 EUR = 1,95583 DM):
A transaction with "1 DM" will now be converted to 0,51 EUR (in reality it
is 0,51129188 EUR).
when I now switch back to "EUR", it will be 0,51 * 1,95583 = 0,9974733 DM
which will be displayed correctly as 1 DM.

The storage of all currencies in EUR in the database will have a lot of
advantages, including the possible transactions, and that you can swith the
views of checkbooks between "EUR" and "DM".
So every account in EURO will have a field in which stands which "old
currecny" it had (DM, ATS, ...) that will be used by the "switch" on the
top.

I hope (or better: pray) thet all will work perfectly with the euro ... I
now spent two days putting several hundred transactions into gnucash, and I
hope I will be able to continue using it :)
I also have some further proposals, as I made myself a lot of thoughts about
this stuff as I once planned to program a business cash booking solution by
myself, but never found the time. But I think gnucash has the potential to
become this application I once thought of...

Regards,
Klaus Ridder
Germany