Accounting in foreign currencies

[homebox at gmx.de]

Charles Day wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 1:17 PM, Danny Rohde <homebox at gmx.de 
> <mailto:homebox at gmx.de>> wrote:
>
>     Hello,
>
>     I have a question regarding accounting in different currencies and the
>     automatic input of exchange rates.
>
>     I have a credit card account in CHF and my expense account is also in
>     CHF. If I go abroad and buy something in GBP I didn't find a
>     "smart" way
>     to record this transaction. If I put in the numbers if does not
>     allow me
>     to use the exchange rate feature because both accounts are in my base
>     currency.
>
>     It would be great, if I could just use the program to get a
>     preliminary
>     exchange rate, before I finally reconcile it from my credit card bill.
>
>     Any idea how to achieve this?
>
>
> Perhaps create a GBP subaccount for your credit card, then enter your 
> GBP transactions there? The credit card's CHF balance, as shown in the 
> account list and reporting, should go up according to the exchange 
> rate. When you receive your statement, enter each foreign exchange 
> transaction in the CHF account as a transfer to the GBP account 
> (reducing the GBP balance).
>
> Hopefully that would work.
>
> -Charles
Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, this is what I actually wanted 
to avoid. Due to the fact that I use several different methods of 
payment. For the cash I have a different accounts, but I want to avoid 
to create a currency account for each credit card and each currency I am 
dealing with.

What I was thinking about is to enable the input of the currency in the 
transaction. This way the currency is not only bound to the base 
currency of the accounts used, but could easily be set to anything else. 
This way I would be able to record the original amount in GBP (other any 
other currency) and the resulting amount in CHF for reconciliation 
later. Currently I am losing track of the GBP amount, because input is 
in CHF only.

I think the data file is able to record this, only the GUI is not 
supporting this. What I am looking at is the following fields in the XML 
file. The first sets the currency per transaction and the other two will 
record the value in foreign currency and in local currency (and 
implicitly the exchange rate used).

      <trn:currency>
        <cmdty:space>ISO4217</cmdty:space>
        <cmdty:id>EUR</cmdty:id>
      </trn:currency>

    and

      <split:value>500/100</split:value>
      <split:quantity>500/100</split:quantity>

Is it possible to implement / switch on this functionality in the GUI?

Regards


>
>
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