Specifications General Ledger

multiple currencies

• There is a base currency for each ledger, the balances of the ledger are stored in the base currency
• There is an international currency
  • it is only used for reporting (previously it was stored with each balance, but that caused too much problems/overhead)
• There can be foreign currency accounts which have balances in their own currency
• exchange rate is stored in the database
  • corporate exchange rate (eg. issued once per month, an average exchange rate over the last 30 days)
  • daily exchange rate: this can be updated each day, or downloaded from Yahoo Finance etc.

transactions

• each transaction has an opposite transaction
  • this was more complicated in the old Petra 2.x, with summarised transactions to save number of transactions in the database
• only one reference/narrative for a pair of transactions
• hmm, this is not completely true; there can also be a group of 5 transactions, balancing to 0, with different amounts, different narrative etc
  • could we use a journal for that in the database? how to display to the user? they want to see all transactions in one list, grouped by journal?
• improved reports will show the opposite transaction(s), on Account Detail report etc.
• posting: should show a preview of how the account balances would be after posting???
• to test: should there be 3 different tables, for transactions from the current periods, the closed periods of the current year, and periods of previous years?
  • is Postgresql fast enough to cope with all transactions in one table?
  • this would make reporting much easier