Andrew, Unless you have a lot of business in USD it is not generally worth setting up a separate USD account. I usually do the occasional purchase totally in AUD with a note in the description of the USD->AUD conversion rate. In this case the transaction looks like:
Bank Account Cr AUD value of USD purchase + AUD Transaction Fee Expense:Purchases Dr AUD value of the USD purchase (could also be an asset account if a capital purchase) Expense:Bank Fees Dr AUD Transaction Fee. If you maintain funds in a USD account for such purchases as you might in a business situation where purchases are regular then the situation is different. David Cousens On Sun, 2023-11-19 at 12:22 +1100, AP wrote: > Hi, > > I've a bill in USD that has been paid with an AUD bank account and I > can't, for the life of me, figure out how to link the bill with the > withdrawal in gnucash. > > The biggest hassle, I believe, is that the withdrawal comes as one > transaction but contains payment for two bills: > > 1. the USD bill > 2. the bank's foreign transaction fee > > I believe that I can kludge it by pretending the transaction fee > doesn't exist and accounting for it in the exchange rate but then I > lose information about how the fees are hitting me. I'd really like to > account for that. > > I tried creating bills for the transaction fee (AUD) and the vendor's bill > (USD) but I (believe that I) need to put them in separate account payables > (due to the differing currencies) and gnucash wont allow me to link the > withdrawal to the two bills as a payment as they're in different accounts. > > I thought of creating a "fake" bank account and buying USD at the right > rate and then using that to pay off the USD bill (leaving the real AUD > account to pay the transaction fee) but that seems a little kludgy and > a bit of a pain. Also not sure if it'd work. :) > > I /can/ put in manual transactions for each bill (from memory) > but whilst that balances the books it means that the payments aren't > linked to the bills and so information is lost (and bills stay unpaid > in gnucash). Again, a little kludgy. > > I read https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.html but > I don't believe it quite fits my situation and so it wasn't as helpful > as I hoped it'd be. > > I went to > https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-guide/chapter_currency.html > but it's not helping either. :( This could be because I'm new to this > accountancy shin-ding. > > I did get the sense that somewhere in all this Trading accounts may well > feature but at a loss as to how. > > I am getting a sneaking suspicion that a Trading account and the "fake" > bank account idea may be the correct path. > > Help/Guidance eould be appreciated. It IS doing my nut in. :) :( > > Andrew > _______________________________________________ > 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.
