Accountant's comments on GNUcash

Maf. King maf at chilwell.net
Thu Oct 22 06:59:28 EDT 2009


On Thursday 22 October 2009 11:13:02 Timothy Wight wrote:

>
> Take the following example:  You bill a client USD1000 and the posting
> of the invoice to the foreign A/R account is balanced by a posting to
> 'Sales Income' of GBP 500 calculated using the exchange rate on that
> day.  Thirty days later (I wish) your customer pays his bill with a bank
> transfer.  Let's be generous and assume he has instructed his bank to
> deduct charges from his account.   However, forex has drifted and that
> USD1000 is now only worth GBP475.  What's more, your bank has charged
> you GBP25 for receiving the transfer.  Your bank account now shows
> income of GBP450 that had been booked as Sales Income of GBP500.  Even
> using currency trading accounts your transactions will balance but your
> accounts will not.  However, currency trading accounts will allow
> balancing transactions to be added.
>

Hi Timothy,

I have a slightly in-elegant solution to part of this problem.  I occasionally 
issue an invoice (denominated in GBP) to customers in other countries.

Admittedly, since all my accounts are in GBP, I don't see any of the 
multi-currency problems you outline and I can't comment on those.

Often these customers pay by international money wire, and my bank (receiving 
bank) deducts some charges from the money as it passes through them.

I handle the A/R payment in the usual way (Invoice->Process Payment), then go 
to the bank account register and manually add an expenses:bank fee split to 
the txn, which reduces the total which has actually hit the bank.
eg.
Bank:current    450
Expenses:BankFee 50
Assets:A/R			        500

It seems to keep everything in balance and easily reportable.

HTH, IANAA etc.
Maf.


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