GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 574317
Entering transaction in foreign currency share account results in 0 in other account (default currency)
Last modified: 2018-06-29 22:19:04 UTC
I have the following setup: Default currency: EUR (Euro) Depot:Share:PaperName Type Stock, Currency DKK (Danish Kroner) Equity:Opening Balance Type Equity, Currency EUR (Euro) Running GnuCash version 2.2.9 (issue also found in 2.2.8). What I do is the following: 1) Opening "Depot:Share:PaperName" account 2) Creating a debit entry with 300 shares, price 122,347 (DKK), resulting in 36.704,16 (DKK) - automatically calculated 3) Credit the "Equity:Opening Balance" account with prefilled credit amount 4) Register the transaction 5) Check the "Equity:Opening Balance" account, and you will find that the transaction can be found there, but all entries are NULL! Seems to be related to Bug #335103 and #335101 (reported against v1.9.2!). Notice that on the tab "Accounts" the "Depot:Share" parent account shows the correct total in both foreign and default currency, just as the "Depot:Share:PaperName" account total is correct. The "Equity:Opening Balance" account on the other hand show a wrong total (because the credited amount is NULL). This is very critical, while I have a lot of share accounts in various different currencies than my default currency EUR.
The currency used in the stock register is whatever currency the parent account (Depot:Share) uses. I assume that Depot:Share uses DKK. If the stock is priced in DKK, how do you buy it with Euros? Where is the exchange done? Theoretically GnuCash should allow this though, and I agree it is a bug (see bug 495137). Currently you need to work around it by first changing your Euros to DKK in a separate transaction. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 495137 ***
Agree that this bug seems to be a duplicate of Bug #495137. Yes, "Depot", "Depot:Share" and "Depot:Share:PaperName" are all DKK currency accounts. The "Equity:Opening Balance" account is in EUR (default currency). I am new to GnuCash, and am starting by entering the account state of affairs as of 2008-12-31, thus have to enter the opening balance of the share accounts, which means that I have to debit the number of shares bought in DKK on the "Depot:Share:PaperName" accounts and credit these transactions to "Equity:Opening Balance", which is kept in EUR. In Quicken (from where I am migrating) there was not any issues with booking shares bought in one currency from an account kept in another currency. In fact, it is not uncommon that I trade shares in one currency paying these in another currency -- This is simply done over my bank, where I have a depot in X currency and accounts in X, Y and Z currencies. The trading will be paid from the account, where I have the most free cash disposable. The exchange is done automatically by my bank, nicely documented on the invoice. .-) In this case, it is just a "simply" open booking having shares accounts in DKK and an equity account in my default currency EUR. Have tried to use your work-around, but I cannot figure out how to get it working. GnuCash continues to do "funny" things, when trying. As it does not work for me, I have "solved" the problem with the opening balances by creating sub-accounts of the "Equity:Opening Balance" account using the currencies of the depot accounts, and then do the bookings using these -- This works! :-D But still, it a *very* strange way GnuCash acts -- I would welcome a (soon) fix of GnuCash to be able to accept a "normal" work-flow of "buying" and "crediting" from the shares account directly -- even if this involves an account in another currency as the shares account.
The workaround described in 495137 doesn't match your situation, since it is to buy a stock priced in currency X with an account also in currency X, even though the default currency is Y. Your situation is a different: buy a stock priced in currency X with an account in currency Y and default currency Y. So I think that you've done the same workaround as mentioned in comment 1, which is to exchange EUR to DKK in one transaction and then purchase the DKK shares with another transaction. Perhaps I didn't make it clear that a separate DKK account would be needed to hold the exchanged currency. I agree that separate transactions should not be necessary, and we can use to bug 495137 to track that.
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