> On Mar 12, 2023, at 7:51 AM, Charles Crossan <crossan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> While doing my monthly ritual of breaking down my utility bill into
> GNUcash, I had the idea of using a user defined currency for electricity
> (Kilowatt Hours - kWh) and Water (gallons). I'd like to be able to chart
> my "real usage" as well as rate fluctuations.
>
> I've been using GNUCash for over 10 years, and have created a bunch of
> custom currencies for stocks / etc; however, this is the first time I
> thought about using it for tracking utility units.
>
> I got as far as creating the kWh currency when I realized that there's no
> way to choose a "non ISO 4217" currency for expense accounts.
>
> The GNUCash documentation seems to indicate that Income and Expense
> accounts are only able to use "National Currencies" (12.2.1.1. User-Defined
> Currencies -
> https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-guide/currency_manual.html
> <https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-guide/currency_manual.html>).
>
> I'm wondering:
>
> 1. Is there a functional reason for this requirement; or is it an
> arbitrary UI restriction?
> 2. Would the application behave erratically if I were to manually edit
> the expense account in SQL to use my own currency?
> 3. How is everyone else handling utility tracking? I realize I'm
> probably a tad crazy for wanting this level of detail.
It's part of GAAP/IFS: Expense and Income are flavors of Equity and that can
only be currency; in fact it's supposed to be only in the book currency, but
GnuCash doesn't enforce that in part because it doesn't historically recognize
a book currency.
I don't see anything in the engine that will misbehave if you do that, but the
account edit window might act up if you try to edit the account after making
the change.
I use a spreadsheet to capture the amount of electricity, natural gas, and
water we use monthly, but since they installed smart meters a few years ago the
utility company has provided a nice usage display on their website with hourly,
daily, and monthly charts, though the daily and hourly data is available for
only a couple of years back.
Regards,
John Ralls
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