Re: [GNC-dev] book currency is what ... question mark

[Wm via gnucash-devel]

On 12/02/2019 17:29, Alex Aycinena wrote:



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John Ralls <jra...@ceridwen.us>
To: Wm <wm_o_...@yahoo.co.uk>
Cc: gnucash-de...@lists.gnucash.org
Bcc:
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2019 20:48:53 -0800
Subject: Re: [GNC-dev] book currency is what ... question mark


On Feb 11, 2019, at 6:49 PM, Wm via gnucash-devel <
gnucash-devel@gnucash.org> wrote:

at the risk of appearing to be an imperialist, what is "book currency" ?

I think of "home currency" as whatever currency most people close to you
(the reader) use to buy and sell ordinary stuff like carbohydrate staples
(rice, bread, etc) and water

in the UK that is GBP, in the USA it is USD, in most of Europe it is
EUR, in other places, depending on government, it might be something else.

my point is, unless your government is failing, you should be able to
use the same currency for your home currency and your bookkeeping.

presuming I haven't gone insane yet, does anyone know what a "book
currency" is?

If someone really wanted to run a set of accounts in another currency
gnc isn't stopping them, the underlying transaction stream works perfectly
regardless.

Book currency is the currency of the book's root account, which you set
when you created the book. For nearly everyone it is indeed their home
currency, but that's immaterial to GnuCash.

Suppose, though, that while your book currency is GBP, you have accounts
in EUR and RUB and you do a transaction between those two. The transaction
will set the transaction currency to the account whose register you use to
create it and will balance the transaction in that currency: If you start
in the RUB account then it will convert the EUR amount to a RUB value and
check that the credit and debit values are equal.

  What Alex is working on is to instead use the book currency for
balancing: GnuCash would in this example convert both RUB and EUR amounts
to GBP values and balance the transaction in GBP. It's an interesting idea
but I suspect that it will be very difficult to get right, a suspicion at
least somewhat borne out by the fact that Alex has been working at it for
at least 3 years.

Regards,
John Ralls


John - what you are saying is absolutely correct except for the part about
working on it for three years. I did start it a while ago, but then other
commitments have prevented me from working on it at all for a couple of
years. The part you describe above will not be hard since the logic already
exists; the integrated lot tracking, though, will be harder. I will shortly
be able to get back to it though. Alex

I think this won't actually work.  I can see the idea but at a tx level 
it is broken unless you take a view that everything is worth something 
in my home currency at that exact moment in time and never changes again.

I think this is an absurd accounting view when fluid assets are available.

I think Alex has thought things through from *his* POV and agree in 
general that a person should support their irrational thieving 
government, if my government payed me to lie I'd propose something similar.

I am against what Alex proposes because it is so unclear what he intends.

Alex: let us know what you mean, then we can progress.

--
Wm

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