EURO-Stock and DM-Account / VAT

[Christian Stimming]

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On Saturday 21 April 2001 02:16, Klaus Ridder wrote:
> 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.

Well, I know that (look at my email address :). But there are some rules 
to follow: We can't handle the currencies from Euroland as exactly 
equivalent. Instead, a transaction from DEM to FRF has to be exchanged 
from DEM to EUR (with an exchange rate of 6 significant digits as in 
1.95583), then rounded to 2nd digit after decimal point, and then 
exchanged from EUR to FRF and rounded again. Because of those rounding 
errors it is indeed a difference whether your bank account is booked in 
EUR or in DEM. Klaus, you might remember your bank asking you whether you 
want to switch your bank account from DEM to EUR (before Jan1st, 2001) or 
not -- at least my bank asked me that.

I think for gnucash right now it's okay to stick to the currency accounts 
to do the exchanging. The medium-term solution will be a special currency 
account with fixed  rate, and the short-term solution will be the 
automatic fill-in of the appropriate exchange rate into the transfer 
dialog.

> 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:

Yes, that sounds good - to show a DEM account in EUR or vice versa makes 
sense. However, you should be careful to distinguish between the actual 
account currency (which is fixed and should remain so) and the current 
view-currency (in a report it's the reporting currency). Only the latter 
may be changed at any time.

> (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.

There you have the rounding problem: If you deduct DEM 1 from a 
DEM-account, then its balance will be reduced by 1 DEM, no matter in which 
currency you look at it. If you deduct DEM 1 from a EUR-account, its 
balance will in fact be reduced by 0.51 EUR which, for greater amounts, 
will result in a different transaction. Again, I ask to carefully 
distinguish between an account's currency and the viewed currency.

Christian

PS: Klaus, for decimal numbers you were using the comma (DEM 1,23)... 
which is the right thing in Germany, but since this mailing list consists 
mainly of US developers, you would avoid some confusion if you switch to 
the decimal point (DEM 1.23). And the currency symbol for German Marks, 
according to ISO, is DEM, not DM... just to avoid unnecessary confusion. 

Also, the translation of some of the financial terms is not at all 
straightforward - e.g. "Abstimmen" is called "Reconcile" in the US 
version, not "conceal"... If in doubt, you could run the english version 
for a second by 'LANG=C gnucash' and look up the english word.
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