Expense accounts should not be single currency

[jgombos]

>I'd have to look up the exchange rate for everything I buy off shore on my 
>credit card every single time.

How do you figure?  If for example all the expense accounts for
Expense:Food:Groceries:{USD|GBP|EUR|CAN} are internalized, so the user only
sees a single Expense:Food:Groceries account in the UI, then the only extra
information required to maintain the same functionality would be the
currency type, not the exchange rate.

If the "internal" expense account were in a different currency than the
asset account that it draws from, only then would the user would need to
supply the exchange rate -- but that's also the case now.  

I was going to say that specifying the currency on a transaction is a small
price to pay for relief from having to manage 2-5 times more redundant
expense accounts; but in fact even the current software  forces the user to
specify currency on each transaction by way of selecting the correct
account.  So effectively the user pays no price for the simplicity of
managing fewer accounts.  

>A few accounts in different currencies makes a lot more sense.

You mean managing multiple accounts to represent a single type of expense
makes a lot more sense?  How so, from the standpoint of the end user?  

>I am then imagining how much more the accountant or auditor would charge to 
>deal with books kept in a manner which don't meet with their standards.

I don't share my raw gnucash records with accountants or auditors, so I'm
not sure what their standards are with that.  But I do produce reports for
them, and from my standpoint what matters is that these reports meet their
standards.  If someone needs to share their whole raw gnucash files, then
the feature I'm describing need not hinder - it would just mean GNUcash
would have to offer a feature to export the information in a way that
exposes the internal accounts.
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