[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Currency Exchange Rate Questions

[Mike Rylander]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 3:29 PM, Sean Sutherland
<ssutherland at tnrdlib.bc.ca> wrote:
> Thanks Dan,
>
> So, from your observations, a currency rate can be edited; however, the
> edit is effective immediately and the previous rate no longer exists
> (thus cannot be viewed). In addition, any invoices posted after the rate
> change are unable to use a previous rate.
>

Once money is encumbered, it's rate is locked, so I think the answer
to that is "they already do".  Does that help?

--miker

> Sean
>
>>
>> After perusing the acquisitions documentation, I have a few questions
>>  regarding currency exchange rates:
>>
>> 1. Since exchange rates are constantly in flux, is it possible to edit the
>> effective dates of a currency's exchange rate?
>>
>> This doesn't appear to be possible at the database level; the table that
>> contains exchange rates simply has the "from" currency, the "to"
>>  currency, and a ratio. There's no concept of dates as far as exchange
>> rates goes.
>>
>> 2. Is there a way to view a currency's exchange rates for a given date
>> range?
>>
>> Not natively within Evergreen right now. I suspect the best way to do
>>  this would be to use a tool like
>> http://finance.yahoo.com/currency-converter/#from=USD;to=EUR;amt=1 to
>>  track exchange rates, rather than trying to turn Evergreen into a foreign
>> exchange rate tracking tool.
>>
>> 3. What date is used to calculate the exchange on a given transaction?
>>
>> Poking at the database schema and some of the code again, it looks like
>> the exchange rate is calculated when the fund is debited for a lineitem. The
>> acq.fund_debit table holds origin_amount, origin_currency, and amount
>> columns, so you could work backwards to see what rate was used when that
>> debit was calculated.
>>
>> The exchange rate is also calculated when you transfer amounts from one
>> fund to another fund and the funds have different currency types.
>



-- 
Mike Rylander
 | VP, Research and Design
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
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