Multi-currency on expense voucher

[Keith A. Milner]

I did a search of the mailing list and bug reports, and couldn't find 
anything. I seem to have hit an issue with multi-currency support on the 
employee expense vouchers.

Basically, it doesn't seem to support it. There are potentially two issues 
(which I will highlight)

My situation is I'm from the UK so all my normal accounts (A/c receivable, 
expense accounts, etc.) are GBP, but I'm doing some work which involves me 
being in Europe.

My normal practice is as follows: I register company expenses (e.g. hotels) as 
vendor bills, and personal expenses (cash) as employee vouchers. Both of 
these are marked against a job so I can recharge them on my invoices.***

As I was working in Europe, all my expenses are in Euros. So, I thought, easy: 
create some EUR expense accounts mirroring the GBP ones, book all my expenses 
against these, and then let Gnucash sort out the conversion.

So I started entering my expenses into a voucher in EUR amounts. Halfway 
through I noticed that the total at the bottom was all in GBP, with no 
conversion.

ISSUE 1: The vouchers don't support multi-currency entry, either mixed 
currency on a voucher, or even a voucher with a single currency.

Anyway, I went back and did the conversion myself and entered the voucher 
values as GBP against my GBP expense accounts. All fine!

Now the next twist is that I had prepared for this trip by taking out some 
funds from the company and exchanging them into Euros. I accounted for this 
as an exchange transaction between my GBP bank account and a EUR asset 
account called "Petty Cash (Euros)". The idea was to use this to pay my 
expenses, as most of them (including 2 weeks accommodation) were in cash.

So, I submitted the personal expense voucher and attempted to pay this "bill" 
from the "Petty Cash (Euros)" account. This seemed to work, but didn't. I was 
expecting the exchange rate druid to pop up, but it didn't.

However, I noticed that whilst the bill had been "paid" and the A/c Payable 
had decreased, the Petty Cash account did not decrease. Looking at the split 
transaction, the part that took the funds from the Petty Cash account was 
blank, but the other half that credited Accounts Payable had a value in it. 
Effectively I had created a single-entry transaction and an imbalance and 
this hadn't been spotted by Gnucash.

ISSUE 2: Paying a voucher "bill" in one currency from an account in another 
currency causes an inconsistancy

Have I found a bug, or is this merely an unsupported operation? Is there 
something I did incorrectly?

This is Gnucash  2.2.1 r16462 running on Mandriva 2008.

regards,

-- 
Keith Milner

*** Incidentally, this works really nicely and, with the correct expense 
headings, allows me to capture P11D information for personal tax purposes - 
the biggest downside is I end up entering this info twice: firstly into 
my "personal expense form" which is a spreadsheet that each employee of the 
company uses to claim expenses and which separates out ipurely internal 
expenses from rechargeable ones, and then this information has to be copied 
into Gnucash. It would be great if I could somehow export the data