[GNC-dev] book currency is what ... question mark

[David Cousens]

Wm,

I must admit I don't use trading accounts much at present. I'll check out
how they handle it.

I take your point on the difference between amounts entered in a transaction
as distinct from the value at a specific point in time in a balance sheet or
even TB. you would want recording aof  a transaction to record the amounts
debited and credited to accounts as the values involved in the transaction
and not be subject to any sort of updating of their value with a change in
the price database. The amount recorded as the price in the transaction
price field should be calculated from the entered amounts and not from a
value in the price database, at least unless the person entering the
transaction specifically requests that a current on-line price or price from
the database be used explicitly. If it was used an extra confirmation from
the user that they are aware of the implications might be in order.

I don't think this is what Alex was proposing. My reading of a use case he
might be trying to address  is that in a case of a multisplit transaction
where more than two foreign currency accounts were involved, the balance
condition for the transaction would be checked in the book currency.  I will
have to check the data structures but I think from a brief look some time
ago there is only one price associated with a transaction, whereas if what
Alex is proposing is what I think he is, it would require a price from the
currency of the account the split is to to the register account currency to
be associated with each split to enable that transaction balancing to occur. 

Ideally I would think a transaction should not be specifically associated
with any specific account other than through the splits to the accounts. I
think that is the case in GnuCash but I haven't explicitly checked the code
but a single price for a transaction if that is the case may break that.
Geert, John or Derek may be better able to comment on this

If you are recording a change in asset value in the register there should be
a specific transaction to do that. No problem perhaps for a report, but even
then  I would always prefer to know explicitly the basis for any difference
between what is in the register and what appears in a report, i.e. it should
be part of the report.

I think we all have a tendency to think the whole world runs the way things
are run in our local environment until we experience a situation that
disabuses us of this false notion, usually travel. I can't say that my
experience of the GnuCash development team indicates that that this
particularly a problem. When something new is developed it is likely to at
least initially reflect what the developer is most  familiar with and it
requires wider input to then generalize it to other requirements. GnuCash is
not a commercial effort where there is a definite financial incentive to
provide adaption to different jurisdictions so it gets down to individual
motivation and enough users with some development skill taking on the tasks
to do that adaption. That unfortunately is not that easy. I found it very
difficult to get to the point where I could even begin to develop any code.
My wife (who was the daughter of a USMC second lieutenant) but was brought
up in Australia is much tougher than I am on US cultural imperialism.

Unfortunately we are faced with governments being unnecessarily prescriptive
about how things should be done in cases where they have minimal expertise.
Making Tax Digital is a case in point in the UK. I am hoping the ATO here
does not catch a case of the HMRC bloody mindedness as we still have a fall
back to a web portal into which we can cut and paste the required
information.

David Cousens



David Cousens



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David Cousens
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