[GNC] Accounting Equation Mismatch for Foreign Currency/Security

Michael or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at comcast.net
Fri Aug 26 08:55:24 EDT 2022


On 8/26/2022 12:31 AM, Gao Bite wrote:
> Gnucash Developers and Maintainers:

> . Also, I cannot make a single-split transaction to record the price 
> fluctuation since there is no debit account to match that credit account. 


The credit account would be an account of type income, probably with a 
name like "unrealized currency exchange gains". If you have more than 
one currency in your books then there will always be gains/losses 
relative to the currency you consider the books to be in.

A thing to note here. For SOME people who have accounts in more than one 
currency, along with income and expenses in those currencies, but who 
only rarely have transactions between those currencies, the "one set of 
books" solution might not be the best. For example, I have a friend who 
is on the faculty of a university  in the UK and so lives there. But he 
also spends a lot of time back here and has funds in US$ to use when 
doing that, and might not be transferring funds between more than a few 
times a year. Were I recommending gnucash to him I would suggest keeping 
two sets of books. The extra work when handling one of those rare 
transactions between and the once a year figuring unrealized exchange 
rate gains when filing taxes would be FAR less work than trying to have 
multiple currencies in the same set of books and actually more realistic 
to the situation (*)

Michael D Novack

* More realistic, because income transactions, expense transactions, 
etc. do NOT normally involve any currency exchange at the time of the 
transaction. It is not the rate THEN that matters.




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