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
  • they can be revaluated with a new daily exchange rate
• exchange rate is stored in the database
  • corporate exchange rate (eg. issued once per month, an average exchange rate over the last 30 days)
    • the corporate exchange rate is used for calculating the reports in international currency
    • it is also used by ICH for clearing the debits/credits of the different offices between each other
  • daily exchange rate: this can be updated each day, or downloaded from Yahoo Finance etc.
    • the daily exchange rate is used for transactions with other currencies (different from base currency)

transactions

double entry bookkeeping

• see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping_system

• 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.

Transactions in GnuCash

• see GnuCash Manual: Multiple Split Transactions; also see a discussion here: [1];
  • there are simple transactions (one split), which just post to 2 accounts, with same (opposite) amount, same narrative etc
  • there are multiple split transactions, that have several transactions, and combined they balance
  • see the GUI of GnuCash for this:

You can switch between View: Basic Ledger, this shows only the summary:

The other View is: Transaction Journal, this shows all movements of money involved:

Posting

• posting: should show a preview of how the account balances would be after posting???

reduce number of tables

• 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