On 2020-05-15 12:35, John Ralls wrote:
Jim,
Use plain text with a fixed-width typeface to be sure that the formatting
survives the list server.
Thank you for the tip. Here are my three examples from my original
message of 14. May
<https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2020-May/091160.html>.
The transaction I entered was this (simplified a bit from my actual numbers):
Account Shares Price Buy Sell
Brokerage CAD:ETF:DLR 200 14.00 2,800.00
Brokerage USD:ETF:DLR.U -200 10.00 2,000.00
That is, move out 200 shares of the US-dollar DLR.UR, at the share price at
which I bought them,
and bring in 200 shares of the Canadian-dollar DLR, at the share prices they
were at when I
bought the DLR.U. That's pretty much what the real-world journal transfer of
shares in my
brokerage account was like.
I expected that GnuCash would add in TRADING:FUND splits to balance the
quantity of DLR and
DLR.U shares in the transaction. I expected to see:
Account Shares Price Buy Sell
Brokerage CAD:ETF:DLR 200 14.00 2,800.00
Trading:FUND:DLR.U 200 10.00 2,000.00
Brokerage USD:ETF:DLR.U -200 10.00 2,000.00
Trading:FUND:DLR -200 14.00 2,800.00
What I got was that, plus a Trading:CURRENCY:CAD split that was not motivated
by anything,
and then an Imbalance-CAD split to balance the Trading:CURRENCY:CAD split:
Account Shares Price Buy Sell
Brokerage CAD:ETF:DLR 200 14.00 2,800.00
Trading:FUND:DLR.U 200 10.00 2,000.00
Trading:CURRENCY:CAD 800.00
Brokerage USD:ETF:DLR.U -200 10.00 2,000.00
Trading:FUND:DLR -200 14.00 2,800.00
Imbalance-CAD 800.00
[Hopefully those examples get through clearly on the list.]
On 2020-05-15 12:35, John Ralls wrote:
GnuCash only knows how to balance transactions in currency so there's always a
currency involved, it's the one for the account that you start from or if that
account has a non-currency commodity like a stock, it's the currency of the
first parent account that has a currency.
GnuCash does know how to balance transactions in multiple currencies if
they start from a banking or credit card account. It does that all the
time when recording my travel expenses. This confirms my suspicion that
the underlying problem is that GnuCash can't handle a _stock_
transaction in multiple currencies.
For a transfer between commodity accounts you use only the currency of the
account you start in. The price doesn't really matter, it's just there so that
GnuCash can make sure that the transaction is balanced… so start in split view
and create the two splits *using the same price for each*.…
OK, I can see this as an effective workaround. Using the same price for
each means the same amount for each split. When GnuCash treats all
splits as in the same currency, even though different splits have
different currencies in their parent accounts, having the same amount
means the splits balance. The drawback of this workaround is that the
transaction will have a misleading share price and amount for one or the
other split.
What I take from this is that it is time to file a bug report in GnuCash
asking for support of multi-currency stock transactions. I may even look
at the source and see if I can figure out how to fix it.
Regards,
John Ralls
I always appreciate your helpful support on this list, on top of all the
development you do. Thank you, John.
Best regards,
—Jim DeLaHunt, software engineer, Vancouver, Canada
--
--Jim DeLaHunt, [email protected] http://blog.jdlh.com/ (http://jdlh.com/)
multilingual websites consultant
355-1027 Davie St, Vancouver BC V6E 4L2, Canada
Canada mobile +1-604-376-8953
_______________________________________________
gnucash-user mailing list
[email protected]
To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe:
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information.
-----
Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
