Tracking Currency Transaction Gains

[John Ralls]

> On Dec 5, 2016, at 8:02 AM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Dec 5, 2016, at 3:41 AM, David T. via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
>> 
>> In working on the Multi-Currency chapter of the Guide, I came across this:
>> 
>> "The proper recording of the currency sale *must* be done using a split transaction. In the split transaction, you must account for the profit (or loss) as coming from an Income:Capital Gains account (or Expenses:Capital Loss). To balance this income, you will need to enter the Currency asset twice in the split. Once to record the actual sale (using the correct amount and correct exchange rate) and once to balance the income profit (setting the amount to 0).”
>> 
>> As I do not use the Currency trading features, I wanted to check with anyone who does to determine whether this is, in fact, true. This section insists that the user employ a split transaction; however, I know that for stock transactions, it is possible to enter gains as a split—but you can also enter them as a separate transaction. Indeed, this is how I prefer to enter gains myself, and it is also how the scrub lots feature operates (which I will come back to later). So, my first question is: do currency transactions HAVE to be entered in one split transaction, or not? I suspect not.
>> 
>> Next, returning to the issue of lot scrubbing, does anyone know whether there is any way for a user to scrub a currency account? It doesn’t seem to work for me (although I admit that I am exceedingly ignorant of how this is supposed to work in the first place). When I transfer cash from one currency to another and back again at a different rate, scrubbing has no effect.
> 
> I don't think it's possible for the user to enter capital gain splits directly in a currency account as the price and value fields aren't visible, and the Transfer Dialog will refuse to open if the amount field is empty or contains 0. Similarly while the Lots Dialog will allow one to create lots and assign transactions to them it doesn't seem to create a gains transaction for currency<->currency lots. See also bug 775368 <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775368>.

I have to retract the second part of that statement: I tried to use the View Lots dialog in the wrong account. I tried again later in the other account and it did create the G/L transaction, but that's true only when using Trading Accounts.

Without the Gain/Loss transaction the Average Cost computation currently calculates the wrong--in some cases *extremely* wrong--exchange rate and for the Balance Sheet report produces a wildly wrong total. I'm working now on fixing that, though I'm not sure that I can without a major rewrite that would mean deferring it to the distant future because I won't have time major rewrites in the report system anytime soon.

Regards,
John Ralls