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)

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.

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: 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