[GNC] Exchange rate of income statement report

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 10/15/2020 5:37 AM, Gal Bar Mashiah wrote:
> I have expense accounts in several currencies, for example:
> Expenses:Food:USD
> Expenses:Food:ILS
>
> I run the income statement report for 2013 for example, select only
> Expenses:Food account (and its sub accounts) and select ILS as the currency
> report.
> The Price source chosen is Nearest in time.
>
> While I expected each Expenses:Food:USD transaction to be translated to ILS
> based on the transaction date exchange rate (the price database is
> populated with that data), what I actually observed is that all
> Expenses:Food:USD transactions are translated to ILS based only on a single
> fixed exchange rate, in this case - the exchange rate as of the report end
> date 31/12/2013.
>
> Is this the expected behavior?
> Is there a way to achieve the behavior I was expecting?

I have been waiting for somebody to raise this as a problem so we could 
begin a discussion about THIS problem with multi-currency books. I 
didn't want to raise what I saw as an obvious "when evaluated" issue 
when it didn't seem to worry anybody else.

The point isn't so much that this person wanted the conversion frozen as 
of the date of the transaction itself (though in that case, maybe want 
to revisit whether multi-currency books apply). The point is that the 
date matters. And there is no "proper date" to use because that will 
depend on the rules of jurisdictions and/or organizations 
rules/procedures. Let that discussion begin

Meanwhile, Gal,  please explain something to me. If you wanted dollar 
amounts converted to shekels as of the date of the initial transaction 
(frozen as of that date) why entered in dollars rather than shekels? The 
normal purpose of having multi-currency books is that amounts are being 
kept in more than one currency precisely because exchange rates DO vary 
over time. In other words, you couldn't just convert as of the date of 
the transaction to a common currency because it is the conversion rate 
at some other date that should be used << at the end of each quarter, at 
year end, etc. >>

Michael