Problem creating a "Currency" account.

[Charles Day]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Quoting Fred Bone <Fred.Bone at dial.pipex.com>:
>
> > It does if you do it this way:
> > 1. Create "Currency" as "Asset"
> > 2. Create Currency:FXI as "Stock"
> > 3. Edit "Currency" and change type to "Income"
> > 4. Reply "ok" to "change children?" prompt
> > Result: an "Income" account denominated in a commodity.
> >
> > Mind you, I haven't tested the consequences ... and you'll probably want
> > to make sure you add all the commodity accounts you expect to need, 'cos
> > adding more later is going to be tedious ...
>
> If GnuCash lets you do this then this is a bug and should be fixed.
> You shouldn't be able to have Income/Expense accounts in non-currency
> commodities.
>

An income account denominated in a non-currency makes sense if the user is
trying to automatically keep track of capital gains for non-currencies using
Peter Selinger's tutorial (implement trading accounts). So it seems like an
exception would need to be made in order to allow that.

Heck, in theory I don't see why any account couldn't be denominated in a
non-currency. It could even be the "home" currency, though I don't know why
someone would have a need for that.

But GnuCash isn't designed that way. Non-currencies have been fenced off for
some reason (Does anyone know why?). So there are probably hidden side
effects in using Fred's workaround.

So maybe, for the moment, using trading accounts for non-currencies is not
supported by GnuCash. So unless you want to try Fred's workaround and see
what happens, it looks like you're stuck with using SSAP 20 to keep the
books in balance for non-currencies. :(

If we have a discussion about how to implement trading accounts on
gnucash-devel, I'll be happy to participate. I meant to start one, but have
just been swamped the last few days.

Cheers,
Charles

-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
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