Easy way to destroy a lot of data without warning

[Derek Atkins]

Paul,

Paul Salmon <paul.b.salmon at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

I agree, GnuCash should warn you before it adjusts this kind of data.  I
suggest you file a bug report in bugzilla.

Thank you,

> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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