Multiple Currencies

[Martin Roennebeck]

David,

I also strongly recommend the documents from Peter Selinger that Mike  
Alexander mentioned in his answer.

In addition to that, I have a similar setup and I do it as follows:
I run German and Singaporean accounts and have income/expenses in both  
countries.
However, I normally pay my Euro expenses from my Euro accounts and my  
SGD expenses from my SGD accounts. So no problem.

It becomes tricky once I transfer funds between my accounts in  
different currencies. Then the effect of not-balancing balances comes  
in, which a very nicely described in Peter Selingers documents. If you  
want to get it right, you really need to take a look at the  
documentation and might want to consider to already use the up to date  
(non stable) version 2.3.17, as it includes most of this concept (and  
it could be considered 'almost stable' anyway). Make sure you choose  
the option to use currency trading accounts.

Now two problems remain:

1) Reports / account hierarchy
If you want to run separate reports in different currencies, I decided  
to split the hierarchy by currency on a top level. This makes it much  
easier to pick the accounts seperately in the report options. Of  
course, one could argue that once you have chosen the accounts you  
could save the settings, but I personally find the split on top level  
easier. Additionally, I use GnuCash to run reports for tax declaration  
purposes, so I definitely wouldn't like to mix SGD with EUR accounts  
in such reports.  I agree, it creates a bit of complexity, but if you  
financially live in two (or even more) worlds, life is complex  
anyway... But this is up to you, GnuCash is flexible enough. A  
specific option to select accounts from only one currency is not  
available.

2) Year end closing
The currency trading accounts can not be picked for balance or p&l  
reports (at least I haven't found a way, where you can do this). So if  
you run your balances over all accounts, they won't balance. However,  
the difference is exactly the balance of the currency trading  
accounts. This acceptable during the year, but for year end reporting  
I am still testing, which posting needs to be done to transfer this  
not realised gain/loss into equity. If anyone knows the correct  
posting, please let me know. (careful: it is not just a simple  
transfer of the open amount in home currency, the p&l of exchange rate  
movements after year end still need to be fully reflected in the  
currency trading accounts)

Hope this helps

Martin




Quoting David Somers Harris <david at somers-harris.com>:

> What is the recommended way for keeping track of finances in multiple
> currencies?
>
> I have assets, liabilities and expenses etc. in two countries, and came up
> with a hierarchy like this:
>
> Assets
> - Canada
> - - Current Assets
> - - Etc.
> - Japan
> - - Current Assets
> - - Etc.
> Expenses
> - Canada
> - - Clothing
> - - Etc.
> - Japan
> - - Clothing
> - -Etc.
> Etc.
>
> The problem is though that when I want to run reports (e.g. expense report)
> it shows everything, but I'm only interested in one country at a time. Is
> there a better way of doing this, perhaps from an account hierarchy
> perspective or a reports setting perspective?
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