GnuCash setup for multi-country use

[cognitive.libertarian+ml at gmail.com]

* Michel Drescher <michel.drescher at gmail.com> [2010-02-13 13:29]:
> 
> I have been working all around several countries in Europe and therefore
> left traces in those countries, including current accounts, credit cards
> etc. The problem with that is that that involves multiple currencies
> (not only the Euro as not all European countries use the Euro as
> currency, e.g. the UK or Sweden).
> ...
> Is there any way to convince GnuCash to behave as desired, or at least
> emulate it?

Gnucash is not well suited for world travelers, and the answer to your
question is no, gnucash cannot have transactions that span multiple
files.

As you have discovered, GNU cash makes a mess out of the currency
support.  It has limitations that force income and expense accounts
into a monocurrency, which leaves users with a mess of replicated
accounts.  

In short, asset and liability accounts should each be monocurrency,
but income and expense accounts should each be multicurrency.  There
have been enhancement requests to fix this problem, but they have been
rejected.  

You choices are to introduce more division to cope with the division
inherent in the expense/income accounts - by creating a file for each
currency; or managing an absurdly large tree of subaccounts for *each*
income and expense account.