Ok, any accounting gurus here?
Let say I've got a good ecommerce friend to accept bitcoins.
He offers up the checkout page and gives the consumer the option to pay in bitcoins, and everyone decides to pay in bitcoins....hurray a success, or so we think....
The merchant would still like to complete the sale in their backend accounting in USD to properly record events to accounting - this is a legal business!
Each sales invoice is tendered as USDBTC to store it separate from other tender options. Tax is collected and posted in USD to the correct accounts.
We know that the amount in USDBTC represents USD that was paid in bitcoins, and our online conversion process was done correctly in realtime on the website.
From the consumers perspective the transaction was completed in bitcoins and they sent the correct amount of bitcons.
At the end of the day the accounting dept has to reconcile the USDBTC ( lets say $1000.00 in sales USDBTC to keep simple) tenders into bitcoins.
Each sale could have a different exchange rate...complicates things for accounting even more.
Accounting would need to convert the USD into bitcoin.
Lets say you enter something like the following in your accounting.
Assume exchange rate is $1.00 = 1.25 bitcoins
Credit BTCUSD for 1000.00 to get the balance to zero
Debit BTC for 1000*1.25 1250.00 (should already be in your bitcoin wallet).
Debit 250.00 to what (the business will not put this in miscellaneous income)
Sorry if this is trivial ... it will not be to small businesses...