Added foreign currency support to starting balances

[lubos]

The latest version (25.11.2) is adding Exchange Rates screen under Starting Balances screen within Settings tab. Let me demonstrate how it all works.

Let’s say your base currency is EUR:

And you have USD foreign currency:

Now, we create foreign currency bank account in USD:

To setup starting balance for USD bank account, go to Settings, then Starting Balances and you will see the following options:

Let’s setup starting balance for USD bank account to be $1,000 USD:

Now, when you go to Summary screen, you will see:

The missing piece is that since we didn’t say what is the exchange rate for USD/EUR pair, Manager will assume 1:1 which will show in Cash & cash equivalents to be 1000 EUR which is not correct.

We enter starting exchange rates under Settings → Starting Balances → Exchange Rates

If you have more multiple foreign currencies, then click Add line to add more currency pairs. Manager will use these exchange rates to correctly establish starting balances in base currency for foreign currency accounts.

Then when viewing Summary screen, you will see correct amount in base currency:

And drilling-down will show you the correct amounts in both base and foreign currency:

[Ealfardan]

This is a great development.

However, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, this just adds one more reason why we should have Starting date field back.

Not arguing for it’s incorporation anywhere, but just as a descriptive field because undated exchange rates leave users asking: when exactly?

[lubos]

The issue with Start date is that Manager doesn’t need to know the start date.

And it was only creating issues when people would change the start date thinking it’s where they set the beginning of new accounting period.

Also, not having start date means that these starting balances will be always at the absolute beginning of the ledger and nothing can be dated before it. One of the issues was when people had their start date set and still kept adding transactions dated before the start date. That was creating new level of confusion.

@Ealfardan

but just as a descriptive field because undated exchange rates leave users asking: when exactly?

It’s difficult to know what new users are thinking. In the end, I assume they have some vision or goal in mind they want to achieve and I’ll just keep refining design to get them to their goal.

So while I don’t know what new users are thinking, I know what traps they keep falling into because that’s what they end up complaining about. We’ve had many topics when people changed their start date and came to complain on the forum all their figures are suddenly out of place. We do not see people complaining “I don’t know what to put into starting balance field because there is no start date field”

[Sweey]

This is a very nice touch and a helpful development.

I also completely agree with you about not specifying a date for the opening balances, as it will complicate things, as I mentioned before. Thank you for this addition, and best of luck.