On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 11:44 AM, John Wiegley <[email protected]> wrote: > Another possibility is adding a -H <COMM> flag, which is exactly like > -X <COMM>, except that it converts values using the day of the > transaction, rather than today. This just means you can't have an > "all-in-one" balance report. Rather, you'd need to reflect the > difference between final and open accounts thusly: > > ledger bal assets liab -X EUR > ledger bal income expense -H EUR
I don't fully understand the implications of this yet (and I need to get some work done too today :) ) but this still seems superfluous to me. When would you track income and expenses against their history value? How would you determine historic value of an expanse - let's say I get amount X from an ATM at an exchange rate of X' on day T1, and amount Y at an exchange rate Y' on T2. Now I have a pocket full of money, and I spend (X + Y / 2). How would you value those historically? There are several valuation models in accounting practice - historic cost, replacement cost etc. (I don't know if these are the actual terms in English, they're literal translations from the Dutch forms). You'd have to provide for these valuation models *in the code*, whereas normally these are done externally, so explicitly from the point of view of the ledger. I'm not convinced the added functionality would add so much value as to offset the added complexity.
