a different conversion from BEF to EUR

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

> On Monday 29 April 2002 11:48, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> > What I would rather want is actually fairly simple ;-) I want to reach
> > into the data files, convert each amount to EUR by dividing them by
> > 40.3399, and then change the id for the currency from BEF to EUR.
> > A clean one-stop conversion, making me believe that I never ever typed
> > anything in in BEF.
> 
> You want to change the amount of each existing transaction? Are you aware of 
> the fact that this will give you tons of rounding errors, thus your current 
> account balance will almost surely be totally different (well, at least in 
> the order of Euro-cents) from what it is now. For that reason we (read: me 
> during writing the Euro conversion wizard) didn't support any changing of 
> existing transactions. Closing the BEF account and opening a new EUR account 
> is IMHO the only sound solution for this currency switch.

This account manages costs between four people living together in a house.  
It averages about 300 transactions a year on an account so I imagine 
rounding errors would at a maximum add up to 300 * (1/2 eurocent) = 1.50 
euro.  That is totally acceptable when you put that up against the 
enormous hassle I get when having to check if each of the four paid the 
right amount of money until now on expense accounts by hand because some 
of it is in euro's and some is in bef's.  I want to get rid of BEF's 
entirely.

> There is no way in the current framework to do this. The data file is not 
> where you would do this; instead, if you want to code this by yourself, you 
> would need to use the Gnucash engine's API and write some code that walks 
> through all exisiting transactions. For the resons pointed out above,  
> currently there's nothing comparable in the code.

Hm, allright.  Is there any good place to start going into the code ? A 
small doc or something that explains where the basics are ?

Thanks,
Thomas


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