Use of lots for gains/losses when using multiple currencies

[Stefan Söffing]

Wm,

Thanks for your reply, sorry for the long delay over here.


Am 17.10.2016 um 20:31 schrieb Wm...:
> Trading accounts do this better, whether you use them or not depends on
> how many currency tx you have and how often they occur and how exact
> they need to be.
I have trading accounts enabled already, but maybe I'm not yet using
them correctly...

>> I understand that I'll need to account for gains/losses explicitly 
> why? unless there is a traded commodity on *both* ends of a tx it is
> best not to bother, a house or an artwork is another story, of course.
> the EUR value of the meal you paid for in PLN is arbitrary
Ok, having read a bit more I understand that using trading accounts,
Gnucash should be inherently able to track (unrealized) gains/losses.
Obviously it's another story if I'd like to "realize" gains/losses,
which is something I'd need to do manually - however I still need to
figure out how to do that sensibly for my case. For stocks I'm fine, I
will create the gain/loss entry with each transaction, based on FIFO.
For currencies however, I don't want to do that on each transaction,
that's far too tedious. However I'm not sure if I shouldn't have a
gain/loss realization when I close the books. I'm not an accountant,
though - probably need to get some more basics on that topic...

>> and
>> that the "lots" feature is supposed to assist. However, in my case, it
>> seems not to be able to assign lots, since the "value" attributed to the
>> splits is sometimes given in base currency (EUR), sometimes in foreign
>> currency (PLN in this example). See the screen-shot attached.
> trading accounts avoids that, also no screen shot when your message got
> to me
My bad, now it should be attached. Unfortunately it's German language,
but you get the point (highlighted columns are "amount" and "value"). As
you see, the "value" column sometimes uses base currency, sometimes
foreign currency. As stated before, I assume that the choice of currency
in that column depends on in which account I entered the transaction in
the first place.
>> It seems that it depends on from which account the transactions are
>> created, since this determines whether the exchange rate is saved as EUR
>> -> PLN or PLN -> EUR. The value used for lot tracking is determined by
>> the first currency used in the exchange rate dialog.
> the exchange rate should be the same regardless of direction at a point
> in time, use the reciprocal (1/[rate] = [other_rate]) to check
Agree, but see above.


Any follow-up greatly appreciated.

Cheers
- Stefan


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