[GNC] lost balancing a USD bill with AUD bank account

[AP]

Hi,

I've a bill in USD that has been paid with an AUD bank account and I
can't, for the life of me, figure out how to link the bill with the
withdrawal in gnucash.

The biggest hassle, I believe, is that the withdrawal comes as one
transaction but contains payment for two bills:

1. the USD bill
2. the bank's foreign transaction fee

I believe that I can kludge it by pretending the transaction fee
doesn't exist and accounting for it in the exchange rate but then I
lose information about how the fees are hitting me. I'd really like to
account for that.

I tried creating bills for the transaction fee (AUD) and the vendor's bill
(USD) but I (believe that I) need to put them in separate account payables
(due to the differing currencies) and gnucash wont allow me to link the
withdrawal to the two bills as a payment as they're in different accounts.

I thought of creating a "fake" bank account and buying USD at the right
rate and then using that to pay off the USD bill (leaving the real AUD
account to pay the transaction fee) but that seems a little kludgy and
a bit of a pain. Also not sure if it'd work. :)

I /can/ put in manual transactions for each bill (from memory)
but whilst that balances the books it means that the payments aren't
linked to the bills and so information is lost (and bills stay unpaid
in gnucash). Again, a little kludgy.

I read https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.html but
I don't believe it quite fits my situation and so it wasn't as helpful
as I hoped it'd be.

I went to https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-guide/chapter_currency.html
but it's not helping either. :( This could be because I'm new to this
accountancy shin-ding.

I did get the sense that somewhere in all this Trading accounts may well
feature but at a loss as to how.

I am getting a sneaking suspicion that a Trading account and the "fake"
bank account idea may be the correct path.

Help/Guidance eould be appreciated. It IS doing my nut in. :) :(

Andrew