tutorial on multi-currency accounting

[Mike Alexander]

--On April 18, 2007 1:57:51 AM -0400 Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> 
wrote:

>
> I'm really not sure I agree with the concept of trading accounts.
> I think it just confuses the issue even more.   How about "hidden"
> equivalences?  Instead of balancing it in a Split, per se, we balance
> it in a KVP?  That way:
>
> 1) it's not visible
> 2) you always know which pseudo-split is the auto-balance split
> 3) you dont add additional accounts
> 4) did I say "it's not visible" yet?
> 5) it doesn't add additional splits to the transaction that could just
>    confuse the user.
>
> I really think "trading accounts" is the WRONG approach for this
> problem.

Clearly I don't agree with that.  Can you be more specific about what 
you don't like about them?  Peter's tutorial makes it pretty clear to 
me that trading accounts are an improvement.  As he says, you can use 
them with no changes at all in GnuCash, all I've done is add code that 
creates trading account splits automatically (if a new option is on) 
and makes it easier to edit them.  Nothing is forcing you to use them 
unless you turn the option on.  Can you point to things in Peter's 
documents that you think are wrong?

I think making all this invisible would confuse things.  Right now you 
can immediately see the effect of currency conversions or non-currency 
commodity transactions by looking at the trading accounts.  You also 
may sometimes want to manually edit trading account splits and if they 
are invisible that's difficult.

I've got things pretty much working now and tonight I scrubbed my main 
file with the trading account option turned on.  After this my balance 
sheet report balanced for the first time ever.  It's never balanced 
before because I have investments in several currencies and the varying 
exchange rates caused problems (for the reasons described in Peter's 
documents).  I've tried hard to get the balance sheet report to deal 
with this, but it's really hard.  After scrubbing my file, and making 
no other change, it balanced on the first try.  Can you describe 
another set of changes that will have this effect?

Regardless of what the GnuCash developers decide about this, I'm going 
to keep using trading accounts, with or without my changes to help 
support them.  They make things much simpler for me.

-- 
Mike Alexander           mta at umich.edu
Ann Arbor, MI            PGP key ID: BEA343A6