Since I had to go to some effort to figure out how to get foreign
currency working, I figured I'd write up what I learned and share it.
cd /usr/src/gnucash/doc/html/C/
diff -wu /usr/src/gnucash/doc/html/C/xacc-currency.html\~
/usr/src/gnucash/doc/html/C/xacc-currency.html
--- /usr/src/gnucash/doc/html/C/xacc-currency.html~ Thu Mar 30 01:32:03 2000
+++ /usr/src/gnucash/doc/html/C/xacc-currency.html Wed Apr 26 09:52:30 2000
@@ -61,6 +61,65 @@
href="xacc-double.html#IDENTITY"> double entry accounting
identity.</a></p>
+ <h1>
+ How to set up a foreign-currency account
+ </h1>
+ <p>All of the above may sound straightforward, but you may get
+ stumped when you first try to represent some foreign money. Let's
+ demonstrate how you'd go about setting up an account to represent,
+ say, French Francs.</p>
+
+ <p>Let's say you have an account that holds cash in US dollars,
+ and it has $1,000 in it. You want to buy about $100 worth of
+ Francs, and naturally you'd like to represent those Francs in
+ their own account. Here's what you need to do:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>
+ Create a new account (name it "Francs") of type Cash, with a
+ currency of FRF (that's the ISO code for French Francs; see <a
+ href="#ISOCURR">ISO Currency Codes</a>, below).
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ Create <em>another</em> account (name it "Trading"), of type
+ Currency, with a currency of USD, and a <em>security</em> of
+ FRF. This account will represent <em>trades</em> between the
+ two currencies, or to be more precise, purchases of Francs
+ with dollars.
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ Now open the "Trading" account, and enter a transaction that
+ transfers from your cash account. Put 555 in the "Bought"
+ column, and .18 in the Price column. You've now bought 555
+ Francs for $0.18 apiece.
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ Last step: transfer the $99.90 that is now in your trading
+ account into the "Francs" account. Note that you could not
+ have transferred anything directly from cash to Francs (try
+ it); those two accounts do not have a currency in common.
+ </li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>A few unpleasant things you may have noticed about the above
+ procedure:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>
+ All the numbers you see in the "Balance" column of your main
+ window are in dollars, even the "Francs" account. This is a
+ bug. Worse, the "Assets" figure at the bottom is simply
+ wrong: it should read $1,000, but instead reads $1,455.10,
+ having apparently added your 555 Francs directly to your 900.1
+ remaining dollars.
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ It's confusing. This could also be considered a bug.
+ </li>
+ </ul>
+ <p>Notwithstanding the above unpleasantness, this is how you deal
+ with foreign currencies in GnuCash. The key is that you need a
+ trading account whose Security field names a different currency
+ than its Currency field, and your trades must go "through" this
+ trading account.</p>
+
<h1> ISO Currency Codes</h1>
<a name="ISOCURR"></a>
--
PGP Fingerprint: 3E7B A3F3 96CA 8958 ACC5 C8BD 6337 0041 C01C 5276
--
Gnucash Developer's List
To unsubscribe send empty email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
