tutorial on multi-currency accounting

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu>:

> --On March 7, 2007 9:50:00 AM -0500 Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:
>
>> If a user later goes back and changes the exchange rate, will your
>> scrubber update the balancing splits?
>
> Do you mean change the exchange rate in that transaction or the 
> exchange rate in the price DB?  If you mean the exchange rate in that

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear.  I meant the former, changing the
transaction.  Obviously the PriceDB shouldn't affect the scrubber
at all.

> transaction, then you (be definition) are change some of the values 
> or amounts in some of the splits and the scrubber will try to fix 
> things up.  This isn't something that you would expect people to do 
> often since it means they made a mistake entering the transaction 
> initially, and the scrubber might not make the optimal adjustment 
> although it should make things valid.

Well, how wouldn't it make the optimal adjustment?  If we assume that
ONLY the scrubber makes entries into Currency:[XXX] then the scrubber
could know about it.   But honestly this really does feel like we're
going back to the pre-1.8 Currency accounts.

Is there some reason we can't use Lots for this instead of creating
accounts and polluting the account hierarchy?  (I admit that I've
only skimmed the original message).

Also, are you sure that "Currency" is the right thing?  Wouldn't we want
this for ANY cross-commodity?

Also, I wonder if we want to use an account hierarchy under Equity
for these balances?   Equity:Commodities:<Namespace>:<Mnemonic>.

-derek

--
       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