Easy way to destroy a lot of data without warning

Paul Salmon paul.b.salmon at gmail.com
Thu Jun 18 08:29:26 EDT 2015


Discovered by a friend of mine by accident :)

Suppose you have an expense account that records expenses in USD, but
the originating currency is a different one for most operations (UAH
in this case). So most of the splits have two currencies, and there is
an implied exchange rate there.

Now go to the expense account properties and change its currency to
UAH. GnuCash will happily do that, and discard the (implied) exchange
rate information, converting every expense to UAH. Editing the account
again and changing the currency to USD will then simply change the
currency, using the exchange rate of 1 USD = 1 UAH.

The only practical way to undo this is to restore from backup. Which
is understandable, but the fact that this is possible without warning
is suboptimal.

What would be nice is if changing the currency on a non-empty account
would warn (upon pressing OK, and only if the account has splits in
it) that splits which have the new currency on the other end of the
split will be changed, while those that don't won't.


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