Multi-currency on expense voucher

[Derek Atkins]

"Keith A. Milner" <kamilner at superlative.org> writes:

> 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)

This is correct.  All the business functions are single-currency.
You can get multiple currencies by having multiple A/R, Income, and
Asset accounts (or A/P/Expense accounts)...

> 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.

The former is true.  The latter is not.  You can have multiple currencies
in multiple vouchers..  It pulls the currency from the "owner" when you
choose the owner and then caches that currency.  So what you need to do
is set your Employee Currency to EUR, then create the voucher -- and then
that voucher will be in EUR.

> 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.

Correct..  It wont do that.  BUT you can go edit the transaction after
the fact and apply the exchange rate.

> 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?

It's an unsupported operation.  Arguably it's a bug, but really, it's
just not supported.

> 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

Sounds like you need to write a report.  :-D

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available