[GNC] Accounting Equation Mismatch for Foreign Currency/Security

[David Carlson]

When you change the exchange rate for a commodity that is not the base
currency you are creating an unrealized gain or loss.  GnuCash is not
configured to handle these unrealized gains or losses without manual
assistance.  How you accomplish that depends on your reporting needs.

On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 11:32 PM Gao Bite <redfrog2000 at outlook.com> wrote:

> Gnucash Developers and Maintainers:
>
> Hello! When I'm processing transactions about foreign currency/
> securities that are not the base currency, I have found a non-negligible
> issue:  the accounting equation becomes unequal when I change the price
> in the built-in editor. Here are the details of the problem:
>
> I live in China and use CNY as the base currency, and I hold some of my
> assets in USD. Suppose that the exchange rate of USD/CNY is 6.5:1 on
> Sept 1st, and it has changed to 6.75:1 on Sept 30th. I hold $500 in USD
> and record it in GnuCash. However, with the new price entered into the
> built-in editor, the total amount of assets would be greater than the
> sum of liabilities and equity by ￥175 in CNY. Also, I cannot make a
> single-split transaction to record the price fluctuation since there is
> no debit account to match that credit account.
>
> One supposed solution you gave me would be using the trading account.
> However, since trading account could not sum up the exchange profit &
> loss in a single time, it would be useless to me.
>
> I sincely thank you for sparing your precious time to this problem.
>
> Yours,
>
> Bite Gao
>
> Aug 26th, 2022
>
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-- 
David Carlson