Sale doesn't show up in Income:Sales

[Keith A. Milner]

On Sunday 09 December 2007 08:39:02 Derek Atkins wrote:

> The business code doesn't handle multiple currencies.  The Customer
> Currency (when you select the customer for the invoice) must match
> the currency of the A/R and Income accounts.  In your case it sounds
> like the three currencies do NOT match, which would result in the
> error you see.
>
> Please read the archives for more information, as I've answered
> the question quite recently.

Yes, it was me that asked.

I played with this quite a bit and never got it working to my satisfaction or 
comfort.

The big problem for me is that I have to deal with not only sales but also 
expenses and expenses recharging, and VAT (input and output). I came to the 
conclusion that to make this work I would have to set up parallel currency 
accounts for A/R and A/P, income accounts, VAT, and for all of my (many) 
expense accounts. Not only was this painful to set up, but also prone to 
error when I'm inputting data (and I book expenses to "Fred Bloggs Hotel 
Expenses (EUR)" instead of "Fred Bloggs Hotel Expenses (GBP)". Believe me 
with a large account tree it's easy to do.

The way I end up handling this is to book everything against one currency 
(GBP) and to do the conversion offline. This works for me at the moment 
because all my sales are GBP. If I get sales in another currency I may have 
to rethink.

It also helps that I use an offline spreadsheet for recording and claiming 
expenses. This was set up for a number of reasons:

1. It provides a paper trail between the employee and the company which is 
separate from the internal company accounting. This may be required for tax 
purposes.

2. It means my employees don't need to log into Gnucash and therefore can't 
snoop around the company accounts or break anything

3. It provides a reporting mechanism for me to get recharged expenses approved 
against different projects (jobs) by my customer.

This spreadsheet is currently only set up for GBP, but (as it's a spreadsheet) 
it's relatively easy for me to apply a conversion at the time I enter the 
transaction. I may alter the spreadsheet at some point so it gives me some 
basic built-in exchange rate support.

In summary, because of the lack of support for multi-currency business 
operations, I stick to using Gnucash with a single currency and do all the 
exchange calculations offline.

Cheers,

-- 
Keith A. Milner