question on currency conversions
Jack
ostroffjh at users.sourceforge.net
Sun Jul 30 19:07:58 BST 2023
This is related to the question at
https://discuss.kde.org/t/scheduled-transaction/3210 but of a more
general nature. These are really theoretical questions for me, as I
only have accounts in a single currency (USD.)
When a transaction includes splits using different currencies, a
conversion is needed. You can obviously calculate the conversion rate
used, by examining the amounts in each split. However, I don't see
that the transaction or the splits has any information about which
conversion rate was used. I wonder if this is something to consider
adding in the future (perhaps a new KVP?) Would there be any reason
to want to know if a conversion was made based on a published (and
downloaded) rate or entered to reflect that actual rate used by the
bank?
It looks to me that when you create a new transaction requiring
conversion, it uses the most recent available conversion rate. (This
is for currency conversions, although stock prices act similarly.) If
you manually adjust the rate, that rate then gets stored as "user
specified."
From the Discuss question - a scheduled transaction will be entered
using the conversion rate implied by the different currency amounts in
the transaction. Would it be useful, when that transaction is entered,
to allow for the most recent know conversion rate to be used as the
default, rather than the implied rate when the scheduled transaction
was originally created? I could imagine this might help for more
volatile conversion rates, such as crypt tokens.
A separate issue is that conversion rates between two currencies can be
(and often are) stored in either direction: USD -> EUR or EUR -> USD.
These "should be" perfectly equivalent. Is that close enough to
reality to store them in only one direction, and display them showing
both directions of conversion?
Final question for now: when a transaction is entered involving a
currency conversion, how does KMM choose which currency to use for the
transaction? I need to do more careful testing, but I think I have
seen a transaction's currency switch when the transaction was edited to
alter the conversion rate.
Again - no high priority for any of this, but I'm definitely curious
about the possibilities.
Jack
More information about the KMyMoney-devel
mailing list