GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 353489
Easier Foreign Currency Transactions
Last modified: 2018-06-29 21:12:01 UTC
I live in the US, so my main currency is obviously USD. If I travel to Canada and make a purchase with my credit card, I have two ways to account for that... 1. Book it as a USD transaction on the credit card account, using an estimated exchange rate. When my statement comes, I adjust it and forget that it ever happened in CAD. 2. Create a SubAccount of the credit card that's in CAD, book the transaction there using an estimated exchange rate, then transfer that amount to the USD account when my statement comes. I would like to be able to book that ONE transaction in CAD in a USD account. It would be automatically converted for display using the estimated exchange rate. I would then enter the final amount when I got my statement, which would then provide GnuCash with the real exchange rate. Other information:
Hmm. This isn't minor, but enhancement. Frankly, I'd be inclined to make it WONTFIX ... it's unclear how this is sufficiently different from (1), and seems to complicate the code to handle a pretty uncommon use-case. If you book multi-currency irregularly, you can get by without it, and if you do, then you do multi-currency the way gnucash intends. (In any case, now this isn't on the "unresponded to bug" list. :)
How does GnuCash intend for me to book multi-currency transactions that occur within one account?
As you pointed out, if one is doing this rarely, it hardly matters. The biggest problem is that you end up needing to look into that subaccount (which is probably filtered out for having a zero balance) to see certain transactions, unless you individually add another transaction to move them up to the parent account in the main currency. I fail to see how "gnucash intends" for me to deal with the case of spending a couple months in a foreign country spending money on an account (credit card) that supports multiple-currency transactions. GnuCash fundamentally only supports one currency per account. That said, I can see why you'd want to WONTFIX this. I'm going to go ahead and do that, figuring that even though this would be nice, the maintenance hassles for you don't justify it. If I did this all the time, I imagine I'd have separate (real-life) accounts any way which would side-step the problem.
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