[Kmymoney] Currency Troubles

[Greg Darke]

Hi, 

> Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2012 07:07:16 +0100
> From: Thomas Baumgart <thb at net-bembel.de>
> To: KMyMoney Users' mailing list <kmymoney at kde.org>
> Subject: Re: [Kmymoney] Currency Troubles
> Message-ID: <6729867.gKdyRianRS at thb-nb.site>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Saturday 03 November 2012 10:35:49 Doug Brown wrote:
> 
> > I apologize if this is answered elsewhere, but I must admit I was
> > unable to figure out how to search the list archives.
> 
> Not sure if that ever came up, but anyhow your question needs an
> answer.
> 

Last year, I moved from the USA to Australia and faced this exact
problem.

> > I have recently moved countries, so want to change my base currency.
> > Which I have done. But it seems categories have a currency
> > associated with them. I don't understand why that is, as it seems
> > to me categories should just be attribute of a transaction and
> > unrelated to currencies, but whatever.
> 
> Well, that is easy: categories are in fact accounts. They are handled
> a bit differently UI wise, but under the hood they are and need to be
> just accounts.
> 
> > I have an existing kmy db in CDN$, but am now entering data in
> > AUD$. I have changed my base currency to AUD, and added new AUD
> > accounts. Because my existing category hierarchy was constructed
> > when my base currency was CAD, all existing categories have a
> > currency of CAD, and I apparently can not change this. This means
> > every transaction I enter in my new currency requires a currency
> > conversion.
> > 
> > This is not what I want. I want to enter AUD transactions into my
> > AUD accounts without fx complications.
> > 
> > What options do I have? I don't want to start with a fresh kmy file
> > as I have a history of transactions I want to keep, and I still
> > have assets in Canada that I would like to include in reporting. I
> > could create a whole new category hierarchy with AUD, but that is
> > rather messy and would make data entry error prone.
> 
> Well, that's exactly what you need to do. As with other accounts you
> created afresh, you need to setup the category hierarchy in the new
> currency. One cannot simply change the currency of an account because
> that would influence your existing transactions and reporting will
> yield all kinds of crazy results.
> 
> UI wise I agree, it could be error prone during data entry, since you
> now have two entries  for each category and I don't know if you can
> distinguish between them easily. Interesting use case: 'change
> location to different base country while keeping full history'. Never
> thought of this one (I did my moves before I started working on
> KMyMoney ;)  )
> 

What I ended up doing was to create new categories in AUD on demand.  I
ended up renaming the old categories eg. "Expenses:Rent" -> "Expenses:
Rent USD" and then recreated "Expenses:Rent" with AUD currency.

All the customized reports needed some tweaking to make sure that the
category filters were sane.

> If anyone else has an idea, please let us know.
> 

It worked out fine for me.

Regards
Greg