12.1. Basic Concepts

GnuCash supports over a hundred currencies, from the Andorran Franc to the Zimbabwe Dollar. For example, you can have a bank account set up in Euros, and another using Hong Kong Dollars.

Some of the issues which arise when using multiple currencies are as follows:

You can either deal with multiple currencies using manually entered transactions to record currency gains and losses as described in Section 12.2, “Manually Recording Currency Transaction” or you can utilize currency trading accounts introduced with GnuCash version 2.3.14 to automatically record the gains and losses on transactions between currencies as described in the subsequent section. Trading accounts are not enabled by default in GnuCash and must be explicitly enabled as described in Section 12.3, “Automatically Recording Currency Transactions using Trading Accounts”.