Expense accounts should not be single currency

[jgombos]

> Use Subaccounts.

> Expenses:Elelectronic:USD
> Expenses:Electronics:EUR

Or I also have the option of:

Expenses:USD:Electronics
Expenses:EUR:Electronics

Which is better?  Someone told me that getting a report on a branch that
contains multiple currencies could be a problem.  Eg, suppose I query for
the total of Expenses:Electronics in your example.  How would gnucash handle
that?  

> Yep, those are your choices.  Accounts in GnuCash hold one and only one
> commodity.  Doing otherwise would be hell in a hand basket and make the
> UI significantly more complex.  You'd have to enter the transaction
> commodity on every transaction manually.  And you couldn't get a single
> account running balance.

> The current method is significantly more agile, simple, and clear.

I disagree.  Although it may be more difficult for the developers, it would
be easier for the end user.  It doesn't make sense from the users standpoint
to separate expenses by currency.  Imagine the world traveler who might have
an expense account structure like this: 

Expenses:Food:{groceries|dining out|lunch}

If they work with five different currencies, that means three logical food
categories would require 15 accounts.  15 accounts to represent 3 types of
expenses is what I would call complexity hell from the user standpoint. 
Gnucash could fix this, by making the currency type a property of the
transaction, as opposed to the expense account.  Adding one more field to
expense records would be simpler for the user than tens or hundreds of more
accounts.  Now perhaps internally gnucash would still need to create a huge
number of accounts, but I see no reason to include them in the UI - they
could be hidden from the end user. 

Anyway, at this point I just want to know the best way to cope with the
problem.  Should I branch the different currencies at the bottom of the
tree, or the top?

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