Don’t enter a rate at all when creating the transaction. Put in the actual amounts for what was withdrawn from the source account, the fees at each end, and the amount deposited in the destination. You’ll enter that last amount in the exchange rate section of the transfer dialog if you create the transaction in the source account. GnuCash will compute the exchange rate and copy it to the price database. You can then edit the price to one more to your liking for price-history tracking. There is no price recorded in the destination split, it’s always recomputed on the fly as the ratio between the amount of the destination currency and it’s value in the transaction currency that will be the same as the source currency if you create the transaction in the source account.
Using trading accounts won’t change those mechanics of creating the transaction. They will make it a little easier to spot gains and losses due to those exchange rate changes/differences and will change the way the register displays amounts in the register’s Split View. Without trading accounts all debits and credits are presented in the current register’s currency while with trading accounts debits and credits are displayed in the split account’s currency. Enabling trading accounts will also add 4 splits to each transaction, 2 in each currency, between the asset accounts and the trading accounts. Those splits balance separately from the regular splits and are re-created automatically every time the transaction rebalances. Regards, John Ralls > On Sep 29, 2026, at 08:27, Paul Kroitor <[email protected]> wrote: > > If I wire transfer funds from a my own bank account in one country to to > another account of mine in a second country, the simple way of handling this > (after booking the transfer fee at both ends) is to just manually fix the > fair exchange rate proposed by Gnucash to the usurious one the bank gave me. > > This way I get a single transaction from one bank direct to the other. As far > as I can see, the only disadvantages are that I get a stupid rate in my > exchange history and I'm not tracking the exchange markup fees. > > But if I do it a dozen times a year, I might prefer to track my cost for > "usurious exchange rates" separately, and also have my rate history not jump > up when I send money one way and swing back in the other when I send money in > the other direction. > > Is there a best practice regarding this? Does the Trading Accounts feature of > Gnucash make this more automatic, and if I enable it, will it complicate > other aspects of booking Forex transactions? > > Thanks as always, Paul > > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-user mailing list > [email protected] > To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user > ----- > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
