Hello, I was pleased to hear that the 1.8 branch of GnuCash would support transactions in multiple currencies since I knew I would soon be working in France and would need to keep track of income and expenditures in both USD and EUR and didn't want to migrate out of my well-established GnuCash environment. But, now that I've taken a look at the new functionality, I think it may have fallen short of what I was expecting---unless I've failed to underrstand the features. The Concept Guide explains how to use the Price Editor to allow parent account values to include the amounts of sub-accounts with different currencies, but it seems that the chapter on recording purchases in a foreign currency has yet to be written. By experimenting with the "Edit Exchange Rate" option in the Actions menu of the register, I was able to figure out how to get a cross-currency transaction recorded such that the appropriate values were visible from each account. But, as far as I can tell, it's currently necessary to enter an exchange rate for each and every transaction (and for each split in a multi-split transaction, even if several splits share the same non-transaction currency!). If you fail to provide an exchange rate for each foreign-currency split, the split's value is set appropriately to the amount in the transaction's currency but the split's amount (what I underestand to be the value in the split's account's currency) is recorded as zero (I assume because the register's rate cell is empty). When such a trannsaction is viewed from the foreign-currency account, all of the values are empty and the account's balance remains unchanged.
As far as I can tell, the price editor is used only for displaying amounts in account trees and reports. Couldn't we use the price database to automatically populate the register's rate cell for foreign currency splits so that the splits' amount fields are calculated appropriately? Or is this not a good idea for some reason I haven't considered? I'm not all _that_ familiar with the GnuCash internals, but from what I've seen in exploring the code, it seems that gnc_split_register_handle_exchange() might be a likely candidate for the lookup---that way if the lookup fails, the user can be prompted with the exchange dialog. There are a couple of other places that might work too, I think, but I'm not quite sure how they all fit together yet. What does everyone else think about this issue? I don't think the problem of wanting to keep track of expenditures in one currency and the asset used to pay for them in another is all that unreasonable (but then again, I'm not an accountant). As I see it now, the only two options are to manually enter currency conversion information for each split or to create sub-accounts for each currency under each expenditure type. Both solutions seem overly cumbersome to me. Michael Culbertson _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
