Handling trading account manually

[Vincent Bernat]

Hi!

I have some difficulties to handle differences in exchange rate. In
France, we already have two accounts to handle the difference in
exchange rates between the invoice and the payment. When we receive less
than expected, we can increase the "loss" account (which I have
registered as an expense account) and otherwisem we increase the "win"
account (which I have registered as an income account).

Last year, I was doing this for an invoice when 1 US$ = 1 €

Client account  (A)  +1000 US$ (= 1000 €)
Service account (I)               +1000 €

Some months later, I was receiving the payment but I got only 900 €. I
was doing this by using the new exchange rate (1 US$ = 0.9 €)

Client account (A)           -1000 US$ (= 900 €)
Bank account   (B) 900 €
Loss account   (E) 100 €
Financial service (E)            100 €

This worked fine. However, the writing is a bit strange. It is like the
bank is giving me money to cancel the loss while the loss account should
show that I didn't receive 1000 € like expected, but only 900 €. This
was not the case with the writing above since both loss account and
financial service account are expense accounts and therefore, they
cancel each other. Hence, I will be paying taxes on 1000 € while I did
get only 900 € (the "service account" is an income account). If I did
close the book with just those two transactions, I would have a net
result of 1000 €.

Therefore, this year, I have been doing this instead:

Client account  (A) +1000 US$ (= 1000 €)
Service account (I)               +1000 €

When receiving the payment, I reuse the exact same exchange rate:

Client account  (A)            -1000 US$ (= 1000 €)
Bank account    (B) 900 €
Loss account    (E) 100 €

If I close the book, I get a positive balance of 900 €. Happy.

After closing the book, I move the balance to an equity account and I
request a balance sheet.

In the first case, I get 1000€ as equity and I have 900€ in the
bank. Not good.

In the second case, I get 900€ as equity and I have 900€ in the
bank. All good!

However, last year, I am able to get a balanced "balance sheet" while
this year, I have an imbalanced one. Maybe this is totally unrelated to
this exchange rate problem but since I was doing something wrong last
year and this worked and I have been doing the right thing and this
doesn't work, I suspect this is related.

If I try request to get trading accounts and repair the accounts, the
difference I get is transfered into those trading accounts but since I
was already managing such accounts by hand, I feel this is like doing
the same thing twice.

I have regularly followed GnuCash versions and I am currently running
2.6.1.
-- 
Watch out for off-by-one errors.
            - The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plauger)