[Kmymoney] Currency Troubles

[Jack]

On 2012.11.04 03:54, Volker Paul wrote:
>> 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 ;)  )
> >
>> If anyone else has an idea, please let us know. Wouldn't that be an  
>> interesting task for developers? Given the root on an  
>> account/category hierarchy, and a target currency, create a new,  
>> parallel hierarchy, empty, with the old hierarchy's structure but  
>> the new currency. As it is empty it won't affect the user's  
>> statistics, the reports should show the same after this operation.  
>> The user can then enter new data into the new category.

There are two other pieces to this in order to make it actually work  
well.  First, the category names need to be different.  I think it has  
already been suggested to append the name of the old currency to the  
old categories, and then use the name without a currency for the new  
ones.

The second one would be to make the old categories inactive.  I don't  
mean to close them like an account (which would probably not be  
possible since they still have all the old transactions) but just to  
set some configuration bit so they don't show up when choosing a  
category for a new transaction (with some way to get them if you really  
need to.)  They should obviously still show up when choosing categories  
for a find or report.

> As an alternative, one could automatically convert the hierarchy to  
> the new currency (not just change the base currency but also convert  
> the transactions), but as every transaction involves two accounts (at  
> least), I'm not sure if that is easily feasible. Also, there is a  
> problem: Which exchange rate to take for the conversion, the current  
> one or the rate at the time of the transaction?

> So I'd rather suggest the first solution, automatically creating a  
> parallel hierarchy. I'm sure many users will have that problem so it  
> makes sense to provide a programmed solution. (Unfortunately, for  
> Doug Brown it will most likely come too late.)
> 
> Regards
> 
> Volker Paul

Jack