Advanced portfolio currency conversion Euro to GBP

[Ray Foulkes]

I cannot get the "advanced portfolio" report to give correct figures for stock in Euros in a GBP set of accounts.

I have transfered a lot of transactions from Quicken XG into Gnucash 1.8.8 (a thousand or so). The balances in the "accounts" view look OK. However, in the "Advanced portfolio" report, the column labelled "money in" has the Euro amount as GBP i.e. either no conversion has been done or the conversion is 1:1. I have entered exchange rates in both directions (euro to and from GBP) in the prices and in other parts of the system they seem to be used ok.

The column labelled "value" has been converted correctly using the latest currency exchange rate. The stock account is quoted in Euros, the prices are in Euros, the asset account which is the parent of the stock account is in Euros and the purchase of the stock was balanced from an equity account, also in Euros.

Truly, I am no expert in double book accounting, nor in the treatment of exchange rates. Can anybody suggest why this column seems not to work. Also, I note that if I change the report to be all Euros, the pound values in this column are not converted (or are using a 1:1 conversion) which makes the whole report meaningless, rather than just one row in the case of the report being in GBP.

There may be another hint of something wrong with my setup coming from another report. If I open the "welcome to gnucash" report, the GBP to Euro exchange is shown as 0.94644 and the dollar exchange rate is 1 USD to 1GBP. Just WHERE are these rates coming from? I have checked carefully in my price editor and can find nothing like these figures. If I open up "balance sheet" and look at the Euro accounts, they are a long way out (looks like 0.94644 as the exchange rate). BUT If I select "options" and change the exchange rate from "weighted average" to "most recent" everything looks much closer to reality.

Clearly there is something wrong with the way that I have set up currency exchange rates, but for the life of me I cannot find out what it is or what is it that swings the weighted average so close to 1. I even looked carefully through the XML but could only find the currency prices that I entered (about 1.5 Euro to pound 0.66 pound to Euro). So far I have been impressed with Gnucash with the exception of this frustration and not much said about exchange rate handing in the docs. Any help would be much appreciated.