[GNC] Purchases in foreign currency.

Adrien Monteleone adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net
Wed Jul 31 17:46:52 EDT 2019


You set (or confirm the current) exchange rate when you enter the transaction. So it can be any rate you need it to be.

While I haven’t traveled in a while, I still have a smattering of foreign currency. I keep that in a Current Asset account called Foreign Currency as a placeholder and a sub-account for each individual currency. Simply transferring amounts back and forth between one of these currency accounts and USD works well. The Transfer dialog will suggest the most recent ‘price’ (exchange rate) from the Price Table, but this can be edited before committing the transaction. So while you can update prices before doing a transfer to get the current rate, you more than likely will be entering these after the fact, or based on some fixed exchange that you’ll want to manually enter. Note that when you do so, *that* specified price is also entered for you in the Price Table and will be used when running reports.

If you make a purchase directly say using Mexican Pesos for take-out food, (assuming the Food:Take-out account is set for USD) then GnuCash will prompt you for the exchange rate when you enter the transaction just like the transfer function. In order for this to happen, you need to enter the foreign currency split first, or enter the transaction from a foreign currency account *to* a USD account. The same would happen if you entered a transaction between say GBP and EUR. The currencies for each account just have to be different to trigger the prompt.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Jul 31, 2019, at 4:20 PM, Clint Chaplin <joatmon at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I travel a lot on business, frequently to non-US destinations, where I am
> using non-USD currency.
> 
> Currently in another financial program, I am handling this by essentially
> using an investment to keep the non-USD currencies.  I transfer USD to the
> investment, purchase the non-USD currency with the exchange rate in effect,
> sell the non-USD as needed back into USD, and then post the purchase as
> using USD.
> 
> I suspect that GnuCash is perfectly capable of handling purchases in the
> non-USD currency, but is the USD equivalent for the purchase set at the
> time of the transaction, or will the USD equivalent of the purchase change
> as the exchange rate changes later?
> 
> -- 
> Clint (JOATMON) Chaplin



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