Multiple Currency Transactions

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

When you create a multi-currency txn you MUST enter the exchange rate
for each txn.  _how_ that exchange rate is entered is still up for
grabs.  Indeed, gnucash should grab the latest exchange rate from the
price editor and present that in the dialog -- if it's not doing that
it's a bug.  You don't say what version of gnucash you're using (just
"1.8 branch" which isn't helpful).

-derek

Michael Culbertson <michael.culbertson at gmail.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
>   I was pleased to hear that the 1.8 branch of GnuCash would support
> transactions in multiple currencies since I knew I would soon be working in
> France and would need to keep track of income and expenditures in both USD
> and EUR and didn't want to migrate out of my well-established GnuCash
> environment.  But, now that I've taken a look at the new functionality, I
> think it may have fallen short of what I was expecting---unless I've failed
> to underrstand the features.  The Concept Guide explains how to use the
> Price Editor to allow parent account values to include the amounts of
> sub-accounts with different currencies, but it seems that the chapter on
> recording purchases in a foreign currency has yet to be written.  By
> experimenting with the "Edit Exchange Rate" option in the Actions menu of
> the register, I was able to figure out how to get a cross-currency
> transaction recorded such that the appropriate values were visible from each
> account.  But, as far as I can tell, it's currently necessary to enter an
> exchange rate for each and every transaction (and for each split in a
> multi-split transaction, even if several splits share the same
> non-transaction currency!).  If you fail to provide an exchange rate for
> each foreign-currency split, the split's value is set appropriately to the
> amount in the transaction's currency but the split's amount (what I
> underestand to be the value in the split's account's currency) is recorded
> as zero (I assume because the register's rate cell is empty).  When such a
> trannsaction is viewed from the foreign-currency account, all of the values
> are empty and the account's balance remains unchanged.
>
>   As far as I can tell, the price editor is used only for displaying amounts
> in account trees and reports.  Couldn't we use the price database to
> automatically populate the register's rate cell for foreign currency splits
> so that the splits' amount fields are calculated appropriately?  Or is this
> not a good idea for some reason I haven't considered?  I'm not all _that_
> familiar with the GnuCash internals, but from what I've seen in exploring
> the code, it seems that gnc_split_register_handle_exchange() might be a
> likely candidate for the lookup---that way if the lookup fails, the user can
> be prompted with the exchange dialog.  There are a couple of other places
> that might work too, I think, but I'm not quite sure how they all fit
> together yet.
>
>   What does everyone else think about this issue?  I don't think the problem
> of wanting to keep track of expenditures in one currency and the asset used
> to pay for them in another is all that unreasonable (but then again, I'm not
> an accountant).  As I see it now, the only two options are to manually enter
> currency conversion information for each split or to create sub-accounts for
> each currency under each expenditure type.  Both solutions seem overly
> cumbersome to me.
>
> Michael Culbertson
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>

-- 
       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