[GNC] strange lack of exchange rates in a new currency cash account

Sun Jul 23 15:09:38 EDT 2023

Scott,

> On Jul 23, 2023, at 03:11, Scott Ellsworth <scott at fastmail.us> wrote:
> 
> ...sorry, accidentally didn't reply to all, so I'm forwarding my reply to the list....
> 
> ----- Original message -----
> From: Scott Ellsworth <scott at fastmail.us>
> To: john <jralls at ceridwen.us>
> Subject: Re: [GNC] strange lack of exchange rates in a new currency cash account
> Date: Sunday, July 23, 2023 17:10
> 
> *Hi John,*
> 
> ----- Original message -----
> From: john <jralls at ceridwen.us>
> To: Scott Ellsworth <scott at fastmail.us>
> Cc: GnuCash user forum <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Subject: Re: [GNC] strange lack of exchange rates in a new currency cash account
> Date: Sunday, July 23, 2023 02:17
> *Thank you for your help. **I've used Gnucash for over 15 years, but suddenly I'm running into my ignorance about some features:*
> The simple solution is to fix that split and remove or fix the 0 price entries in the pricedb.
> *I never even knew about the Price Database before. In there I saw one item for every day, and I see a non-zero price for only one day, the 20th. When I went to the dong account just now, went into every split of every transaction, and clicked Edit Exchange Rate on each one, I only found one that was blank. I don't think I've solved the problem by entering the rate for that transaction, because I still see the Account Summary telling me that my ₫2,394,000.00 is worth $0.00 after refreshing it, when I know that it's actually worth about $101.*
> **

It works off the latest price in the pricedb. If that's 0 then so will be the home-currency values on the accounts page and in the summary bar.

> 
> You should check your other VND transactions to make sure that there aren't any other 0-price splits. There's only one set of prices for any particular commodity pair so you'd have to make a new book to see different price behavior.
> *I think I have this covered now based on what I said above, but the problem remains. Looking at the Price Database again now, I still see a non-zero price only for one day in spite of the correction I made.*

Editing transactions won't change an entry in the pricedb. Only creating a transaction will, and then only if there isn't already a corresponding price for that day. That means that if you create the first transaction of the day with a zero price and immediately correct it you still have a 0 price in the pricedb that you have to manually fix or delete.

> 
> The more complicated problem is how did that 0-price split get created and why did that become the price for the day instead of one of the others. Would you be willing to post a transaction report of the VND account with Display optiions set to show date, date entered, accounts, shares, and prices  with one line per split? Leave off description, memo, and account to keep confidential what you spent the money on, that's irrelevant here.
> *I'll be happy to do this, but I haven't figured out how to add those columns to the register view.*

Not in the register view, in Transaction report options on the Display page, but in light of your other answers I think that it's not necessary.

Regards,
John Ralls

> 
> *Be Well,***
> * ***
> *Scott***
> <<<< Scott Ellsworth || +1 (775) 386-2519 >>>>
> On Jul 22, 2023, at 01:34, Scott Ellsworth <scott at fastmail.us> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi John,
>> 
>> Every transaction is big enough to equal more than one cent. And the dong cash register starts with an ATM withdrawal of 2 million dong. 
>> 
>> In the Price Database, which I was not familiar with before, I see three entries, two of which are at zero value. The Account Summary now shows "₫540,780.00 $0.00" but the transactions do usually have dollar equivalent values: When I look at my Food account I see that the most recent transactions were worth $1.18, $0.25, and $38.53. But I notice one transaction from the 19th, a split transaction where the Food component came out to zero and the number fields are simply blank on that line, not with zeroes shown. The other parts of the transaction were $6.19 spent from Assets:Cash:vn dong balanced against $3.18 spent on Expenses:Health, so the transaction obviously does not balance. When I go to the blank line for Expenses:Food and click on Jump, nothing happens. But when I go to the Cash:vn dong account and find that transaction, I see an amount for the food component, 549,000 dong, which was missing in the Food account.
>> 
>> This is confusing. I hope my file is not corrupted, since my financial data is important to me. And it's strange that even after I created a second dong cash account to test, the new account had the same exact problems.
>> 
>> Be Well,
>> 
>> Scott
>> <<<< Scott Ellsworth || +1 (775) 386-2519 >>>>
>> 
>> ----- Original message -----
>> From: john <jralls at ceridwen.us>
>> To: Scott Ellsworth <scott at fastmail.us>
>> Cc: GnuCash user forum <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
>> Subject: Re: [GNC] strange lack of exchange rates in a new currency cash account
>> Date: Friday, July 21, 2023 23:24
>> 
>> Scott,
>> 
>> Did you perhaps get the balance to  2M VND in small increments so that the USD value of every transaction rounded to $0.00? That would have prevented the price from being recorded, resulting in the symptoms you describe. If you've been trying to use VND for several days you can look at the price database entries to see if any of the earlier transactions recorded prices.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>> 
>>> On Jul 21, 2023, at 01:14, Scott Ellsworth <scott at fastmail.us> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Another strange thing: It might be starting to work normally now: I just entered a couple of transactions and accidentally entered the exchange rate as 23,600 instead of 1/23,6000. Now it's starting to show the dollar equivalent on the Account Summary, even after I went back and corrected the exchange rate on those two transactions. I'm not sure if it's fixed, but at least for right now it appears to be working normally again.
>>> 
>>> Be Well,
>>> 
>>> Scott
>>> <<<< Scott Ellsworth || +1 (775) 386-2519 >>>>
>>> 
>>> ----- Original message -----
>>> From: Scott Ellsworth <scott at fastmail.us>
>>> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>>> Subject: strange lack of exchange rates in a new currency cash account
>>> Date: Friday, July 21, 2023 15:06
>>> 
>>> Dear fellow Gnucash users,
>>> 
>>> I have a strange problem with a new currency account that I just added the other day: I created a cash account for Vietnamese dong (VND), and somehow it's not working with exchange rates. The two strange things I'm noticing are:
>>> 1. Every time I create a new transaction in this account, I have to type in an exchange rate manually. (With other cash accounts (other than USD, my default currency) an exchange rate always is remembered from earlier transactions.)
>>> 2. On my Account Summary report, I see the new account, which I've named "vn dong" and placed under Assets > Cash, and the number of dong that I have in cash, but the US dollar equivalent always shows up as zero. (I use "Cash" as a placeholder account, under which I have all my cash currencies including US dollars, euros, Japanese yen, etc.) Right now, for example, it shows "₫2,080,870.00   $0.00" but in dollars that should be about $88.
>>> 
>>> I thought maybe the new account was somehow corrupted, so I tried creating a new one from scratch, but the same problem occurred again.
>>> 
>>> The one thing that is different about this currency compared to all others for which I have cash accounts is that it's very tiny: It's about 23,600 dong per US dollar. Is Gnucash not able to handle such extreme exchange rates?
>>> 
>>> Be Well,
>>> 
>>> Scott
>>> <<<< Scott Ellsworth || +1 (775) 386-2519 >>>>
>>> 
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> 
> 
> Be Well,
> 
> Scott
> <<<< Scott Ellsworth || +1 (775) 386-2519 >>>>
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