Checking and credit card accounts in different currencies

Christian Stimming stimming@tuhh.de
Mon, 3 Dec 2001 12:03:01 +0100


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On Monday 03 December 2001 01:34 am, Arnim Vogel wrote:
> Since I am german but curently living abroad, I have checking and credit
> card accounts in both DEM and USD currencies, and I have expenses and
> income on both kinds of accounts. In Quicken, I categorized all my income
> and expenses. For both currencies, I used the _same_ categories. I could
> assign
> transactions the categories - independent of the currency - directly.
> In GNU-Cash, the only way I found to deal with different currencies is the
> use of a currency account inserted in the middle of a transaction. In some
> cases, this seems me a good way, since it makes the currency exchange
> explicitely visble.
> In my situation, however, almost _every_ transaction now goes via the
> currency account. Basically, all my USD income/ expenses go first to the
> USD-DEM-Trader currency account, from which I distribute them to the income
> and expense accounts.

What I did was that I basically set up one income/expense account for each 
currency for each category. Yes, that'll end up in a lot of accounts (e.g. 
Income/Salary-USD and Income/Salary-DEM), but it gives the flexibility of not 
having to decide the exchange rate at the time of entering. The exchange rate 
could rather be calculated on-the-fly by the reports.

Christian
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