Hello, David.
Finally had time to go over your explanation with the books open, I'm adding my observations inline.
If I read it correctly you will have paid originally in totally €320.44 for the laptop (€313.21 cost of the laptop + US$7.23 shipping/commission fees, which would have been a total cost in € which was presumable expensed against Costi:Euro:Elettronica/Fotografia in the purchase transaction.
It's even weirder than that, actually: the defective laptop costed 313.21EUR inclusive shipping but they did not reimburse the amount paid, rather the base cost of the laptop plus what I spent to send it back, that's why they had to make an extra payment on top of the paypal reversal. I can understand the logic, I'm fine with it.
Technically it would have been better to have recorded that at the time of the refund not during the closing operation by using a multicurrency transaction refund to Costi:Euro:Elettronica/Fotografia rather than Costi:Dollari:Elettronica/Fotografia in 04 which would have forced the currency exchange at that point. Then in 06 you would only have to close the fees and commissions $0.69 to Risultatao:Dollari.
I think I'll have to keep the two transactions separate because the dates, one day apart, would not match the respective entries in Paypal but I will retroactively change the currency as you suggest.
I had always naively assumed that income / expense accounts had to match the currency of the asset, not because some limitation of gnucash, rather because that was "The One True Way" to do it.
My preference would be to keep all expense accounts in € (including the fees and commissions) and force the currency conversions at the time they occurred in 04. Then there would be no closing transactions from any foreign currency accounts. Whether this is possible for you may depend on your jurisdictional rules for recording transactions in foreign currencies. You may need to consult a local accountant to advise you on this.
My current setup is perhaps a consequence of my life: I began using it in 1999 here in Italy (ITL at the time), then I spent nearly all of 2001 in Finland, right before the changeover to EUR. Since I was paid in FIM, it came naturally to me to create income / expense accounts in FIM and well. When I travelled to Estonia on holiday, I recorded the expenses against EEK-denominated expense accounts and of course the EEK result was a net negative. I still had some FIM left when I came back to Italy and the finnish bank later did the FIM-EUR conversion for me. Anyway, to cut to the chase, that's how I got the idea of using the same currency for expenses as the asset I used.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, I have a followup question: this year I bought shares in a mutual funds which is listed in USD. Naturally, there were 9 dollars of commission on the trade. At the moment I have used a USD expense account for that. I'll have to move this as well if I don't want a funny result like above, right?
Andrea. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
