Yes, I’ve been considering whether using an Equity account would solve the problem. So far I haven’t really understood how they are supposed to be used. I’m not completely sure if a negative value is a gain or a loss in an Equity account?
Beancount does seem to internally use Equity:Conversions for FX transactions, but I haven’t really worked it out yet – except that I end up with massive balances in that account, positive in some currencies and negative in others. I’m not sure if that’s how it’s supposed to be, or if it’s a symptom of me doing something wrong… I’ve played with manually “converting” the currencies using “currency accounts” as described at https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_v3.html#currency-accounts-instead-of-a-single-conversion <https://beancount.github.io/docs/beancount_v3.html#currency-accounts-instead-of-a-single-conversion>, but so far I haven’t managed to convert that currency loss to an actual loss instead of having it show up as a gain (negative expense or income value). It sounds like you have the exact same problem as me, so let me know if you find a solution more elegant than just denominating all commodities in your primary currency. Incidentally I’d be very interested in your "plugin that adds a separate Canadianese version of everything” – I also need to report to two different tax authorities in different countries and haven’t worked out how to do that properly yet. Have you published your plugin anywhere? > On 2 May 2021, at 16:21, James Cook <[email protected]> wrote: > > Maybe Income:Exchange should instead be Equity:Exchange or something? > > In my mind, that money is going into the same place the converted > amounts go when you write a posting like > > Income:Investments:PnL -984.48 GBP @ 1.3182 USD > > Doesn't that posting use "Equity:Conversions" or something like that > under the hood? > > I have been thinking about how to handle a similar situation for > myself: I have bought and sold some stocks in CAD, but need to report > my profit/loss in USD to the IRS. I was thinking I'll just record the > costs in USD --- in the analogy to your situation, that would be GBP. > That doesn't meet your main requirement #2 but I think I'm okay with > that if it makes things simpler. > > (I also need to report my gain/loss to Canada in CAD, but for that I > wrote a plugin that adds a separate Canadianese version of everything.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/1CE39066-F746-447E-9A56-B9D87A7FF0BD%40caesarschinas.com.
