[GNC] Multiple currencies and business functions

Christian Kluge frakturfreak at gmail.com
Tue Nov 6 15:39:48 EST 2018


Hi,

just a minor addition.

Am 06.11.2018 um 21:29 schrieb Christian Kluge:
> Hi,
> 
> Am 06.11.2018 um 18:22 schrieb Geert Janssens:
>> Op dinsdag 6 november 2018 17:16:16 CET schreef Matthew Pounsett:
>>> I have cases with both billable employee expenses (vouchers) and billable
>>> purchases (vendor bills) which need to go on customer invoices.   This is
>>> fairly straight forward... the problem I'm having is how to deal with these
>>> when the currency I'm entering the voucher or bill in is not the same as
>>> the customer's invoice currency.
>>>
>>> To use a concrete example, say I've got a $100 employee expense in CAD that
>>> gets marked as billable.  If I have a client whose default currency is USD,
>>> when the item is added it appears with the CAD value ($100) but is added up
>>> in the total at the bottom as if it's USD.
>>>
>>> Is there a step I'm missing somewhere to get it to show up as a USD value
>>> in the invoice?
>>
>> I believe you have just pushed the boundaries of what to do with invoices 
>> further than anyone ever could have imagined :)
>>
>> I don't think anyone so far ever considered the case of having billable 
>> expenses in a different currency from the invoice currency. And from what you 
>> tell I gather it's currently not supported.
>>
>> The currency logic is pretty simple: every amount you see in the invoice 
>> entries is assumed to be in the customer's default currency. They income 
>> account for each entry can be in a currency different from the invoice 
>> account. In that case a currency conversion will be applied when posting this 
>> amount to the income account. But as amounts for billable items come from the 
>> entries, they are assumed to be in the customer's currency.
> 
> 
> That’s why my solution would be never to income and expense accounts in
> foreign currencies, but only assets and liability accounts in addition
> to the trading accounts.
> 
>>
>> This is a bug either way: or gnucash should prevent an entry from appearing as 
>> billable if it's original bill is not in the same currency as the invoice, or 
>> gnucash should support this and properly handle currency conversions.
>> The first solution will be far more easy to implement than the second though.
>>
>> Can I ask you to file this as a bug report in bugzilla ? Refer to http://
>> wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Bugzilla on how to use our bug tracker.
> 
> 
> For the actual problem my solution would be as follows.
> 
> Firstly I would grab the current conversion rate via Finance-Quote or
> get it from somewhere else.
> 
> That next thing would be to setup an temporary assset account in CAD so
> that you can record your income later on.
> 
> After this I would write the invoice and use the account previously set
> up as the Income Account.
> 
> Beware when writing the invoice you’d have to write the converted amount
> in USD in the unit collumn. Luckily gnucash has rudimentary calculator
> functions so that you can just write 100.00 press ÷ or × depending which
> way the quote is given and paste the rate and you should get the
> converted amount.
u>
> I would mention the CAD amount in the description and maybe also add the
> conversion rate there or after the total invoice amount.
> 
> Then go on and add your other billable lines.
> 
> If you’re going to post the invoice, you’ll get asked for the conversion
> rates.
> 
> If everything plays out you should get the same amount in CAD, else just
> change it, there sometimes are little rounding errors.
> 

The other solution would be to cancel the posting and change the unit price.

> The last operation would be to add a transaction from the temporary CAD
> asset account to your normal USD income account.
>


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