Easy way to destroy a lot of data without warning

[Paul Salmon]

Not sure if trading accounts would have helped. She spends in UAH
(Bank & Cash are UAH) but tracks expenses in USD. Occasionally she
spends in USD and then there is no conversion. Apparently she decided
to change one of the expense accounts to UAH for some reason. To top
it off she went on and did a lot of work while awaiting for my
response to her question about this... :)

The exchange rates were entered manually for each transaction when it
is first created.

GnuCash version is 2.6.5 I believe.

Thanks guys. Filed https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751356

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 4:58 PM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> 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.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>
> -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
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available