Split entry/edits Not Workable with Trading Accounts Enabled

[pete.dickson at gmail.com]

Maybe I'm still missing something here, but the workflow of entering
foreign currency transactions seems unworkable with Trading Accts activated.


My home currency is CAD. Without trading accounts, I can go to a USD
account and open the splits and see everything in USD. I can just to the
CAD side of any of these transactions and see all the splits in CAD.

If I have a statement or receipt in USD I can open the USD acct and enter
all values in USD, entering exchange rates as prompted.

So far so good -- very intuitive and usable.

But with Trading Accounts enabled, viewing transaction splits is no longer
intuitive, and entering transaction splits is a challenge and in fact I
seem to lose some of GnuCash's built-in functionality that should come into
play when entering the splits.

Here's an example:
Wthout TA: Txn entry in USD acct:

Asset:PayPal-USD           83.21
Expense:PayPal Fees         2.79
Income:Sales                         79.00
Income:Pre-Paid Shipping              7.00

Note here that only the Asset acct is denominated in USD, yet split entry
is entirely in USD. This works great because the USD values are known, and
the exchange rate entry dialog that pops-up lets me enter the appropriate
exchange rate or target dollar amount directly.

If I view the txn from one of the CAD-denominated accounts, I see all the
splits in CAD:

Asset:PayPal-USD           91.26
Expense:PayPal Fees         3.06
Income:Sales                         86.65
Income:Pre-Paid Shipping              7.68


But with Trading Accounts active, this is the final view, as seen from the
USD acct:

Asset:PayPal-USD           83.21
Expense:PayPal Fees         C3.06
Trading:CURRENCY:CAD       C91.38
Income:Sales                        C86.75
Income:Pre-Paid Shipping             C7.69
Trading:CURRENCY:USD                 83.21

(Note that the CAD splits have a C, and the USD do not.)

Viewed from one of the CAD-denominated accounts, I get the same numbers,
except now the USD splits have a dollar sign, and the CAD ones do not:

Asset:PayPal-USD           $83.21
Expense:PayPal Fees          3.06
Trading:CURRENCY:CAD        91.38
Income:Sales                        86.75
Income:Pre-Paid Shipping             7.69
Trading:CURRENCY:USD               $83.21

A big loss here is that we no longer see each side of the transaction
denominated in its respective currency. Both sides of the transaction now
show the splits in mixed currency, which imo is not a very intuitive
display.

Another change of behaviour is that if I want to adjust an existing
transaction split -- let's say I change one of the dollar amounts in the
split -- when I tab out of that line, it does not populate the new
imbalanced amount on the bottom line like it does without Trading Accounts.
So we seem to lose the auto-calculation-of-remaining-imbalance
functionality when doing an edit.


BUT the the BIGGEST LOSS of functionality is that Gnucash no longer
calculates the resulting CAD amounts for me when entering the known USD
values. Actually it's worse: even though I am in a USD account register,
GnuCash is expecting me to enter CAD values for the splits for any CAD
accounts. It seems I now have to calculate the CAD values first and enter
those in order to "reverse-engineer" the USD number which I already knew,
and without Trading accounts I could just enter directly.

But that seems just crazy, so I really hope i'm doing something
fundamentally wrong here.

Cheers!
Pete