Specifications General Ledger

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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

double entry bookkeeping

  • 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: GnuCashTransactionViewBasicLedger.png

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

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