Severe currency conversion bug when posting business invoices

[Geert Janssens]

On vrijdag 18 november 2011, Mukund Sivaraman wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> I am evaluating GnuCash for my small business.  I have stumbled upon a
> reproducible bug and here's a complete report including how to
> reproduce it, screenshots and a testcase file.
> 
> I am in India (default currency = INR). My customer is in the US
> (currency/security = USD).
> 
> In my book options, "Use trading accounts" is checked. I've created an
> invoice for the customer in USD.  The income account for the invoice
> entries is "Income:Sales" (INR account).  Invoices gets posted to the
> "Assets:Accounts Receivable:USD A/Receivable" account (USD account).
> Accounts under "Trading" are automatically setup, and I don't touch
> them.
> 
> I have configured the currency rate as 50.9451 INR / USD using the
> Price Editor for the USD security.
> 
> Here's a sample invoice in the editor (also available in the testcase
> file below):
> 
> https://malgudi.org/~muks/tmp/gc-invoice.png
> 
> The bug is, that when the invoice is posted, neither the manually
> entered price nor the price downloaded by Finance::Quote is correctly
> used.  What seems to happen is that 1 INR is converted to USD by the
> code in XferDialog and rounded to 2 decimal places.  1 INR in USD is
> computed as 0.02:
> 
> https://malgudi.org/~muks/tmp/gc-transfer-dialog.png
> 
> A reciprocal of this seems to be used for the 1 USD to 1 INR
> conversion, which results in 1 USD = 1/0.02 = 50.00 INR.  This is
> further set as a new price.
> 
> https://malgudi.org/~muks/tmp/gc-price-editor-before.png
> https://malgudi.org/~muks/tmp/gc-price-editor-after.png
> 
> This bug is severe as if you're converting USD 2000 to INR, you're off
> the mark by > INR 2000.
> 
> Furthermore, if Finance::Quote has been used from the Price Editor to
> fetch and set a price just before posting the invoice, both the
> A/Receivable account and Income:Sales account use _different_ prices,
> going out of sync immediately.  Trading in the tree shows RED.
> 
> https://malgudi.org/~muks/tmp/gc-main-window.png
> 
> For anyone who wants to reproduce this issue quickly, here's the
> testcase gnucash file:
> 
> https://malgudi.org/~muks/tmp/test.gnucash
> 
> I can reproduce this with both trunk and 2.4.8 on Fedora 16.
> 
> Any workarounds/fixes are much appreciated, as I want to put GnuCash to
> use.
> 
> 		Mukund

Hi Mukund,

You have stumbled upon a bug in GnuCash, which has been reported a while back 
[1]. I don't know of any workaround for this unfortunately.

Geert

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=649362