Re: multi-currency transactions

[Jan Nielsen]

Derek, Christian,

I am convinced that I am not able to follow your reasoning about this issue ( I have a feeling that you are talking implementation instead of functionality, but so be it).

I'll try to make a simple example again to illustrate what I think should happen when editing transactions between two different currencies. I realize that the situation is more complicated than what I cover, but I still think simple things should be simple to do.

Assume the following simple situation:

2 bank accounts a) AccountUS with currency USD and b) AccountGB with currency GBP.

On 2/1/2003 a transaction is entered in account AccountUS withdrawing 10USD and transferring it to AccountGB using a To-Amount mechanism specifying that AccountGB will be credited 6GBP.

A ledger view of this might look like this:

-------------------------------------------------------------------
AccountUS
Date Desc Transfer Deposit Withdrawal Balance
2/1/2003 Tx GB AccountGB 10.00 10.00


AccountGB
Date Desc Transfer Deposit Withdrawal Balance
2/1/2 Tx GB AccountUS 6.00 6.00
-------------------------------------------------------------------

First observation: For my personal use of gnucash it would be preferable that the transfer dialog is always popped up automatically when making a transfer between two account with different currencies (independently of whether it is a stored transaction or there is a price available from somewhere). Now, I don't personally care too much about whether the actual implementation underneath stores all this using exchange rates, all in USD, some in USD, some in GBP etc. What I see in the ledger is the above.

Now, for some reason I have a need to adjust the above transaction. My typical need arises from having to adjust the "to-account", but I think this might be immaterial.

In my example I need to adjust the AccountGB as the bank has communicated that they have credited my account with GBP 6.15.
So _what I would like_ to see is:

-------------------------------------------------------------------
AccountUS
Date Desc Transfer Deposit Withdrawal Balance
2/1/2003 Tx GB AccountGB 10.00 10.00


AccountGB
Date Desc Transfer Deposit Withdrawal Balance
2/1/2 Tx GB AccountUS 6.15 6.15
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Observation 2: The simple way to achieve this would be to simply open the AccountGB ledger and change the deposit amount to 6.15. However, in current gnucash (CVS 28122002) this also changes the AccountUS as follows (which I do _not_ like):

-------------------------------------------------------------------
AccountUS
Date Desc Transfer Deposit Withdrawal Balance
2/1/2003 Tx GB AccountGB 10.25 10.25


AccountGB
Date Desc Transfer Deposit Withdrawal Balance
2/1/2 Tx GB AccountUS 6.15 6.15
-------------------------------------------------------------------

I think the natural use of the to-amount functionality is that a change made directly in the ledger should have the effect of simply changing one side of the equation if the original transaction has been made using "to-amount" (which by the way comes natural to an old Quicken user such as me). I do realize that this requires a flag to store this information, but then so be it.

3rd Observation: If this on the other hand is not possible I would think that using the "Edit Exchange Rate" dialog, it should be possible to simply change either the "Amount", "To Amount", or "Exchange rate" fields to obtain the same result.

I.e. the dialog should really have a multi choice of "Amount", "Exchange Rate" and "To Amount" where one of the three can be selected for editing and one (another one) for keeping fixed. E.g. to make my example above the method would be to select "To Amount" for editing and "Amount" for keeping fixed. The result would be that the exchange rate changes and that the resulting ledger would be as I would like:

-------------------------------------------------------------------
AccountUS
Date Desc Transfer Deposit Withdrawal Balance
2/1/2003 Tx GB AccountGB 10.00 10.00


AccountGB
Date Desc Transfer Deposit Withdrawal Balance
2/1/2 Tx GB AccountUS 6.15 6.15
-------------------------------------------------------------------


I hope this was clear(er)

Cheers

Jan



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