Failure to balance with multiple currencies

[John M Collins]

Thanks to everyone for their help on this especially Jannick.

After a lot of experiments it would seem that exactly one transaction
caused the entire problem and its deletion corrects the trial balance in
that each column shows the same figure at the bottom but there seems to
be no way to re-enter the transaction at the relevant date without
causing the trial balance to fall over again. I've tried doing it in
pieces but again I hit problems.

A bit of background.

We trade in GBP but we have a selection of bank accounts including a USD
account (we do some Euro transactions as well but we can ignore these I
think). Our company fiscal year is 1st October to 30th September.

We had accumulated a fair amount of cash in USD whilst the GBP was high
against the USD as I had put all USD receipts into that account for
several years. When the GBP started to drop against the USD I thought it
would be a good idea to convert some of the USD to GBP (I wish I had
waited a bit longer as it dropped further shortly afterwards but then my
crystal ball was having hardware problems).

I converted $100,000.00 on 22nd October 2008 and the GBP account was
credited with £60,835.47

I entered this on the "Transfer" action and it seemed to run OK but as I
reported when I came to do a trial balance the figures don't balance by
a huge amount. If I delete that transaction it balances on the trial
balance.

If I delete it and re-enter it as $50,000.00 converted to £30,417.73 it
balances.

However if I add another transaction (with a different date) after doing
that with $50.000.00 converted to £30,417.74 it no longer balances.

If I make the transaction $10,000,000 converted to £6,000,000 (I wish!)
the trial balance is nearly correct - it's out by £0.05 this time.

I notice that if I set the option to display the exchange rates on the
trial balance report the figures are incorrect whether or not the trial
balance balances - in the one case (where the balance doesn't balance)
it thinks $1.00 = £2.56 (a not insignificant number???) but in the other
case (where it does) it thinks $1.00 = £0.0047

There does seem to be some bug somewhere maybe an overflow in the
"fraction" form of holding the exchange rates (although all the rates
I've effectively entered are decimal).


John Collins jmc at xisl.com Skype: toadwarbler

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