[GNC] Enhancement request: multi-currency accounts

William Prescott will at theprescotts.com
Thu Oct 20 22:26:46 EDT 2022


Whatever works for you is fine. I would find that strange. I have income and expenses in two currencies pretty much all the time. I live in one country and still have property in another. I keep track of everything in the currency that it occurred in. Conversions occur if I am traveling in a third country and have an expense is some other currency. Then it gets converted to one of the primary two currencies depending on which bank card I used. I have debit cards in both currencies. The other time something gets converted is if I move money from a bank in one country to a bank in the other. Then one side of the transaction will obviously be in one currency and the other side in the other, But keeping all my expense accounts in one currency sounds crazy to me. I keep them in whichever currency they were paid with.

My 2 cents, and worth what you paid for it.
Will

On 2022 Oct 20, at 10-20 11:28:34, Patrick Pöndl <patrick at poendl.de> wrote:

I am a new GnuCash user and currently busy setting everything up. I have
done a lot of thinking and testing on the multi-currency issue in order to
hopefully get it right from the start.

[...]

income or expense accounts, the amount has to be converted into the base
currency using the exchange rate on the day the transaction occurred, or at
least closely. Exchange rates normally do not move a lot from day to day,
but over many months or even years there can be huge moves - and those will
ruin the data in your GnuCash book if you don't consider this effect.

If somebody has another solution, please let me know, as the extra effort
to make the conversion for each transaction is obviously anything but fun.

Best regards,
Patrick Poendl

Am Mi., 19. Okt. 2022 um 02:47 Uhr schrieb <gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org
> :

> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Anton Tsyganenko <anton-tsyganenko at yandex.ru>
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Cc:
> Bcc:
> Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2022 13:34:13 +0400
> Subject: [GNC] Enhancement request: multi-currency accounts
> Let's take a look on accounts that are created in gnucash by default.
> Generally most of the accounts may be multi-currency, i. e. not bond to
> a specific currency: you may have cash in multiple currencies, your
> opening balances may be in multiple currencies, you may have incomes and
> expenses in multiple currencies. Bank accounts generally have only one
> currency, but there are some banks that offer multi-currency cards and
> deposits. These surely can be considered as just a few different
> accounts, but it may be more convenient to group them together.Now I
> solve that by creating sub-accounts for each currency I need for each
> account where I need it. It looks like:
> Expenses:Dining:USD
> Expenses:Dining:EUR
> Expenses:Dining:CAD
> Expenses:Transport:USD
> Expenses:Transport:EUR
> Expenses:Transport:CAD
> 
> It's very painful to create all of them. I know that I may have only one
> account in my _main_ currency, but I prefer all currencies to be equal
> and not perform redundant currency conversions, for example when I spend
> CAD cash for dining in Canada.
> 
> So my proposal is:
> 
> All accounts that user creates are "multi-currency", like placeholder
> accounts without any specific currency. Sub-accounts for each currency
> are created automatically, when the first operation in this currency in
> this account is made. If a multi-currency account is deleted and
> operations are moved to another account, operations in all the
> subaccounts are moved to the corresponding subaccounts of the second
> account. Balances can be shown as a sum of (non-null) amounts in
> different currencies (but sometimes can be converted to one currency).
> In a multi-currency account's view (basic ledger) there should be just
> an additional column -- currency of an operation (editable as a
> drop-down menu). So user opens account "cash" and sees something like:
> 
> Date | Description | Transfer | Debit | Credit | Currency | Balance
> 
> 2022-10-18 | Dinner in a restaurant | Expenses:Dining | | 25 | EUR | 100
> USD + 55 EUR
> 
> That operation is a transfer of 25 EUR from Assets:Cash:EUR to
> Expenses:Dining:EUR.
> 
> I would be happy to discuss the concept.
> 
> 
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