On 18/02/2019 06:43, David Cousens wrote:
I must admit I don't use trading accounts much at present. I'll check out
how they handle it.
I like trading accounts, they make sense to me. If you don't do a lot
of stuff outside of your home currency you probably needn't bother
unless you are interested in the actual value of things.
have a look at
https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.html
gnc is but one implementation though we do get a mention! :)
[snip agreed]
I don't think this is what Alex was proposing. My reading of a use case he
might be trying to address is that in a case of a multisplit transaction
where more than two foreign currency accounts were involved, the balance
condition for the transaction would be checked in the book currency.
If that is what is proposed it is bad thinking. I do understand that
for people that rarely encounter anything outside their own bubble this
would be a convenience, but if, at the end of the tx there is something
left over (some shares, some currency, anything) then this is just
painting over the cracks.
I will
have to check the data structures but I think from a brief look some time
ago there is only one price associated with a transaction, whereas if what
Alex is proposing is what I think he is, it would require a price from the
currency of the account the split is to to the register account currency to
be associated with each split to enable that transaction balancing to occur.
I think we agree on the proposal, I think it is a bad idea. I
specifically do not want all my tx rewritten into a single currency.
I really do have 1.00 ZAR and 2.00 USD and 3.00 GBP and 4.00 EUR. I
only have some equivalent value in AUD when I report on it, my accounts
should recognize what I have and what I owe in real (i.e. world) terms,
e.g. I owe my girlfriend 100 EUR for dinner not however many GBP it was
at the moment I asked her to pay because they wouldn't accept my card.
Ideally I would think a transaction should not be specifically associated
with any specific account other than through the splits to the accounts.
It isn't, a transaction is the sum of the splits, the splits have
accounts, not the tx. The tx is the human convenient glue that keeps
the splits (the actual transactions) together.
I
think that is the case in GnuCash but I haven't explicitly checked the code
but a single price for a transaction if that is the case may break that.
Geert, John or Derek may be better able to comment on this
I think I must be misunderstanding again. In many cases there *can't*
be a single price for the tx.
If you are recording a change in asset value in the register there should be
a specific transaction to do that.
accounting practice allows for (usually non-traded or infrequently
traded) assets and liabilities to be valued and revalued by explicit tx,
that is never going to go away; in most jurisdictions there is a whole
bunch of tax related stuff saying when you should or shouldn't do this
but gnc isn't going to stop you :)
No problem perhaps for a report, but even
then I would always prefer to know explicitly the basis for any difference
between what is in the register and what appears in a report, i.e. it should
be part of the report.
The general rule is that an actual price (i.e. that implied from the tx)
overrides a price from the prices db. I think gnc does this correctly.
It is the reports that are getting muddled and not being examined
sufficiently because a diminishing number of people understand them.
They're in Scheme, a language that was old before my time and I am in my
50's. <-- That's a fact not a crit of our seniors. I know they want to
move on and allow people like me to write reports for others.
I think we all have a tendency to think the whole world runs the way things
are run in our local environment until we experience a situation that
disabuses us of this false notion, usually travel.
A good observation.
I can't say that my
experience of the GnuCash development team indicates that that this
particularly a problem.
I am not saying bad things about our seniors. There are number of them
that are aware of more than one currency and certainly not isolationist
people. I think (someone may correct me) that most of the gnc trading
account stuff was implemented by a USA-ian [1]
[1] I might have made an enormous mistake by mixing Canadian and
American <-- joke! USA is not America, duh!
When something new is developed it is likely to at
least initially reflect what the developer is most familiar with and it
requires wider input to then generalize it to other requirements. GnuCash is
not a commercial effort where there is a definite financial incentive to
provide adaption to different jurisdictions so it gets down to individual
motivation and enough users with some development skill taking on the tasks
to do that adaption.
I disagree with that slightly, there are definite jurisdictional
adaptations. The good ones are generalized,
consider: there are only so many ways to add a tax to an invoice so
let's generalize it, this is progress, gnc does this well
and there are bad ones: Reports / Tax Schedule Report & TXF Export
this means nothing to me, should it be removed? no; should it be put
somewhere less prominent? yes. why should one country's tax filing be
OK and another country's not be allowed?
Some people have put some effort into tax filing in European (or soon to
be ex-European) countries, the general report would probably cover 90%
of the rest of the world. The gnc seniors don't see this. Grrrr!
That unfortunately is not that easy. I found it very
difficult to get to the point where I could even begin to develop any code.
My wife (who was the daughter of a USMC second lieutenant) but was brought
up in Australia is much tougher than I am on US cultural imperialism.
Does she think of herself as an ex-pat or not? :)
Unfortunately we are faced with governments being unnecessarily prescriptive
about how things should be done in cases where they have minimal expertise.
Making Tax Digital is a case in point in the UK.
Yup, other countries too, but making the report can be made easier.
I am hoping the ATO here
does not catch a case of the HMRC bloody mindedness as we still have a fall
back to a web portal into which we can cut and paste the required
information.
It gets worse in some places where you theoretically have to have been
using approved software to be able to file a report :(
--
Wm
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