On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 11:56:20PM -0500, Mike Alexander wrote: > --On February 22, 2007 4:09:22 AM -0400 Peter Selinger > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I have also written a fairly detailed critique of multi-currency > > accounting in GnuCash, with some suggestions for how it could be > > improved. Unlike the tutorial above, this second document is specific > > to GnuCash, but must be read after the tutorial: > > > > http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/gnucash.html > > I thought I would let folks know that I've been working on some changes > similar to the ones suggested on this page. As might be expected, it's > not as simple as it seems and I don't know if the result will be useful > or not, although it looks somewhat promising. I thought I'd mention it > here in case anyone else is thinking about working on this. If so let > me know so we can compare notes. I'm making all these changes under > control of a new preference and if it is off GnuCash behaves as before. > When I get something working I'll submit a patch in case anyone is > interested in it. >
Mike, Peter, et al., I should have spoken up eariler, but have been pretty busy. I just now skimmed Peter's reports, and wanted to comment. First off, Peter's assessment of GnuCash's flaws are fundamentally correct. I went through a similar process of research and conclusion about a year ago, when I started the register-rewrite branch. It turned out to be a lot more work than I expected, because I hadn't yet realized _why_ multi-currency didn't work in the existing register. Relative to GnuCash, my conclusion was that the existing register design is fundamentally incapable of being used to "do multi-currency" correctly. This is the cause of many of the very long-standing open bugs regarding multi-currency support. So, when figuring out how to make it work correctly, I found that I had to not only re-implement, but also re-design the register and many of the functions that ensure balanced transaction entry. The good news is that I believe that GnuCash's foundational Transaction and Split data structures can accomodate the "right way". Mathematically, the contraints and relationships in a multi-currency transaction are exactly the same as in a "stock" transaction, with capital gains/losses. Peter's recommendation that the register show the currency in each split is essential to any sort of reasonable interface to accurate transactions. While the use of full-blown trading accounts has some nice properties, there are also some smaller changes that would still be an improvement, even if it still meant calculating exchange gains/losses at report-time. Those changes would allow someone who wanted to use trading accounts manually to do so correctly. Fundamentally, I see this as a UI issue, and I believe that I've designed the new register in such a way as to support multi-currency transactions correctly, albeit still with report-time calculation of gains/losses. Mike, if you're up for it, I encourage you to take a look at the register-rewrite, and see if it supports multi-currency transactions correctly. Even if you're not, I'd be interested to hear more specifically which improvements you're working on. (BTW, I know you have outstanding patches filed in BZ that might relate to this functionality. I feel bad that they've been neglected, but the fact is, everybody's understandably shy to touch some of that messy code.) Just a status note about register-rewrite: It should be completely functional, just not very polished and not yet convenient to use. For evaluation, I like opening a new register and an old register side-by-side in adjacent tabs. (You can do this by double-clicking accounts in a budget, which still opens the old register.) -chris > -- > Mike Alexander [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Ann Arbor, MI PGP key ID: BEA343A6 > > > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-devel mailing list > gnucash-devel@gnucash.org > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
