Bank/CC to Expense, diff currencies

[Derek Atkins]

Ken,

Ken Runge <kr at bell.net> writes:

[snip]
>  DB CND Expense $132.000
>         CR USD Credit Card Account $100.00
>
> In my dreams I would like to enter these two lines into, say the USD CC register, which is designated USD while the Exp. account is designated CDN and let the program fill in the blanks using the Trading Accounts for USD & CND. What I find is happening is a proliferation of unwanted 'out-of-balance' splits which I can't seem to get rid off and which I think should not even appear except perhaps if the entry, when finished, is not balanced. Of course, if the Trading Account function worked as it should the transaction, in its entirety, would never be out of balance. I think, or I thought at one time, I can get the transaction to balance but the process is difficult and cumbersome and frankly a pain-in-the-ass. 

One confusion could be views.  Specifically, GnuCash will translate the
amount shown to the "local view" currency, which might be different than
the split account's currency.  I.e., you enter a transaction for US$100
and it shows 100.00 for both debit and credit.  At this point GnuCash
SHOULD pop up the exchange rate dialog where you can tell GnuCash that
the US$100 is CA$132.

The register will still show 100.00.

If you jump to the other side (to view the CAD account) it should then
display 132.00 (for both splits).

> When I travel to a foreign country I just manually convert the foreign
> transactions back into USD and use my USD Asset/Liability and Expense
> accounts.
>
> But, of course, your example is not multi-currency but rather a 'back-of-an-envelope' example. If you had a actual EUR, GBP or CND account so designated in GC then your calculations would not work because you need to start with the non-USD amount as my example above outlines. If you charge the converted USD amount to the foreign currency account you would never be able to download and reconcile that account because your bank statement would report GBP 10.00 but your GC account would show something different. What I think you maybe referring to is what happens when your USA bank does the conversion for you and charges your USD account with the equivalent of the foreign purchase. From GC's point of view this is not multi-currency. 

This is true.  And your last point is absolutely accurate.  When I use
my (USD) credit card, they will translate any foreign currency
transaction back into USD.  All my real-world accounts are in USD.

When I obtain "local cash" I still denote that in USD.  My Gnucash file
never has accounts in a foreign currency, so it's always a transaction
from USD to USD.  It does mean I have more overhead, because I need to
manually keep track of e.g. how many Euro do I actually have for that
e.g. $123.45 in the "Euro Cash" account I maintain.

> In the end; however, this is all a moot point as I have concluded that except for the transfer of monies between balance sheet accounts, that is bank a/c to bank a/c or bank a/c to CC account, GC is unable to handle two currencies in the same transaction, such as the example noted above. Accordingly, I have created a parallel set of expense accounts in USD and will record USD CC to USD exp. Still a major pain for a program which purports to support multi-currency but one has to work with what has available. Sure hope I don't open GBP or EUR bank accounts in the future!  With some experimenting I have got an I/E report to show what I am looking for. 

I admit I haven't ever tried it, but there is nothing special about
income/expense accounts that would make the multi-currency features work
any differently than they do for asset/liability accounts.  It's the
same underlying logic in the register.  Really, the only difference
between the account types are the column labels (and in SOME
circumstances, like Stock/Mutual accounts, a few extra columns).

So you SHOULD be able to enter a multi-currency transaction between an
asset/liability and an expense account.

> Thanks again for your interest.

I AM trying to help.. and if there is a bug I'm trying to help hone in
on where the bug might be so it can be fixed.  What you're asking for is
supposed to work.

-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