I have many books in my database that are from other countries. I religiously keep track of the cover price of my books and what I paid for the book.
I’ve always found it kind of annoying that there is not a monetary unit next to the cover price - so I can specify the correct value based on the where the book was published.
Right now, I just have to keep in the back of my mind that if I am looking at a book that was published in another country - that the value I enter in the cover price field is not reflective of US dollars.
This has been requested before and might make it at some point to the mobile app/web app.
Currently, the currency can only be set at the global level and then hold for all books, all price and value fields.
Allowing to set a separate currency for each different price field or value has been on our idea list for quite a while.
However, even though this sounds like a simple addition, it is not.
There is one big problem with this: Totals. The main reason why users want to enter prices and values is to see totals in the Statistics screen.
So, as soon as we would allow setting a currency for each field separately:
there would still be a need to provide some kind of total for these entered prices
obviously, the prices entered can then not be summed up anymore
so the program would need to either:
show separate totals for each currency
OR
use exchange rate to convert prices to one “target” currency and total them that way
which means that there needs to be some setting to choose the “target currency” for totals
it also means the program would need to know about exchange rates
and while exchange rate change all the time, it would need to have some way to automatically download current exchange rates.
also users of course want to convert the currency using the exchange rate at the time of purchase.
so the program would even need to know about historical exchange rates.
And suddenly, a simple feature becomes a HUGE project, even needing a collaboration / license with a 3rd party that delivers exchange rates. Just giving you some background why this simple feature still has not been implemented
That said, it does not mean we will ever implement this.
I had thought of some of those hurdles, but definitely not all of them. When/if this is ever implemented it sounds like it would be an awesome feature based on your comments below. Maybe implement in stages? But then you might have a bunch of support questions about why it doesn’t do the rest! So maybe not!
Thanks for providing such an in depth response! It was great to see that you all are thinking about to such depths.
I’ve asked for this feature on all products in the line before, and have heard the reasons.
it is not necessary to automatically update valuations, that can be limited to output operations where that datum is relevant.
The most important part is being able to record different entries and not generate a bogus value problem, because a nominally $ based collection has multiple ¥ entries.
OANDA has API tools (Exchange Rates API | Currency & Forex API | OANDA) and I would pay an up charge on Book Collector, Movie Collector, Music Collector, Comic Collector, and Game Collector to have both original price to target currency and current value available.
But really it’s about correctly documenting the state of how things were acquired and what was paid originally.
Given the effort that was thrown at pricing in Comic XYZ addon, that might be a good place to start to see what it costs, since there is apparently a market.
that there is not a monetary unit next to the cover price - so I can specify the correct value based on the where the book was published.