[SOLVED] Re: How to I record a Credit Card purchase in foreign curr bill?

Anonymous noreply at breaka.net
Sat Apr 13 15:25:19 EDT 2013


>I have been using something like this myself but I somehow managed to
>convince myself I was doing something "wrong" since I wasn't
>capturing my real cost during time of purchase.

You can do better if you want to concretely separate the real cost
from the forex cost.  Banks have a fuzzy, non-transparent way of
computing the exchange rate.  The percentage that they charge is never
a spot market rate.  E.g. if the banks ToS states they will nick 2%,
the /real/ forex cost will vary from 1.5% to 2.5%, roughly, because
the wholesale rate that the bank itself pays is based on a daily
average -- never the realtime spot rate at the moment of the purchase.
In fact, the bank does not even know when transaction occurs.. only
when it's processed, so the bank could not be precise even if they
were motivated to.

So, to be precise, look at the timestamp on the receipt, and then get
the historic mid-market spot rate from that moment in time.  This data
is hard to find, but I'll mention a free source if you're interested.

Then when you get the bank statement, the actual charge will obviously
vary.  That difference is a foreign exchange cost.  You can adjust a
split transaction, or you can keep it simple and make a separate
transaction to capture the forex difference.

BTW, did you tag the thread as "[SOLVED]" to discourage further
replies?



More information about the gnucash-user mailing list