Do you support multiple currencies?

Edit Subject

There are ways to handle this Ed. There's a process called 'triangulation.' We can avoid a lot of that by simply concentrating on the cash aspects but as you still need to account at the end of periods, it's as well to bite the bullet.

You can estimate the GBP equivalent at the time of billing. There will likely be a change between billing and receipt but that's either a (usually) small net gain or loss unless you're working in highly volatile currencies.

The bank statement should provide sufficient detail and in any event, the customer often provides either an electronic remittance advice or a paper version.

Whatever happens, there is usually evidence of one kind or another that can be relied upon.

Sticking with a single currency choice per country won't work. Many of 'us' are working across multiple currencies - in my case 3 (USD, GBP and Euro) so the choice needs to be there.

Ed,

Thanks for the update. It's a shame because it looks like freeagentcentral would be ideal for me, apart from the multiple currency issue.

I'd like to have the free trial extended, and I'll have a play around with some of the other features to make sure they do what I want/need.

Cheers,

R.

Oh yes, I'm well aware that it's not an easy task. I have 2.5 years of pain to prove it :)

R

Jim P,

Thanks for making contact. Development for our multi-currency invoicing is well underway but we don't expect to be handling multi-currency banking for a while. It's significantly harder and we need to do some more research into the most usable way of doing it.

Sorry if that's not the answer you wanted to hear just now.

At the moment I don't have the need for managing bank accounts in different currencies, but some of our clients are invoiced in foreign currencies (USD or EUR), so we do have some multi-currency requirements.

Echoing Radek's post, here's a suggestion that would provide the functionality that I'm guessing many of us need, without having to build a full multi-currency accounting system across the board:

Allow hourly rates and other line entry items and the invoice as a whole to be specified in a foreign currency. However when saving it, use a current exchange rate to store the expected GBP total as the value for the invoice for all accounting/reporting purposes.

The client would receive the invoice with all values in the foreign currency. Then when payment is received e.g. by bank transfer, the transaction can be "explained" by linking it to the foreign currency invoice, which then gives a actual GBP figure to the invoice and an actual exchange rate.

If required the difference between the expected and actual figure can automatically be added as an exchange rate gain/loss. An alternative is the real amount overrides the expected.

As it is, the way foreign currency invoices have to be managed is to approximate the foreign currency hourly rate in GBP for timesheets, create GBP invoices in Free Agent, manually create separate foreign currency invoices using a word processor, keeping them filed separately, and then have to do the manual explaining the difference as an exchange rate gain/loss once they're linked with the actual bank entry. This is very laborious and error prone, particularly when recording timesheets automatically into Free Agent.

A similar process could be used for expenses, so they can be entered in a foreign currency as per the receipt, but the entry in the bank statement would be in GBP and could be linked as an explanation to the expense. This would be extremely useful for travel expenses.

This approach would keep the actual Free Agent accounting system, i.e. reporting, transactions between accounts, etc, still in a single currency, but the invoices and expenses can record their original currency amounts.

This wouldn't solve everyone's currency issues, but may be a good interim step.

The main issue I think is that the 'near future' has been thrown around for a year. That's just poor expectation management, if it's going to be included in the next release and you do, and major releases are monthly, that would be a better indication of how long the wait is.

I appreciate you can't do everything at once, although we are taking more foreign currency than pounds at the moment (USD & EUR specifically), and it's slowly becoming a blocker for us. All the other nice features (which other competitors don't have) will soon not matter.

I agree as well, great features and interface don't mean a thing if I can't bill my clients with jumping through hoops. I will not be upgrading from the trial until I can bill in USD.

Hmmm.
If I were to upgrade, wouldn't I you bill me in USD?

This feature is deal-breaker for me.

Most of our invoices and many expenses are in EUR and other currencies, although we are a small UK based company. The bank account is GBP but we must invoice our project in the home currency of the client.

I checked out xero.com and it looks good, but no project / job costing, so no use to us, although it does have strong currency support.

Similarly Kashflow.

I’m just adding my voice to the crowd, please get multi currency support working soon - I’m on a trial account at the moment and FreeAgent looks fantastic. However, up to now I’ve been entering historical data - and if I were to use FreeAgent full time it would be a huge hassle not to have multi-currency support. The majority of the work I do is abroad and I often have to invoice in the local currency. In addition a large amount of my expenses are in other currencies. I can get around the expenses issue (though it’s a huge pain) by manually looking up historical exchange rates, but I won’t be able to use invoicing at all.
I’m afraid this might be a blocker for me and I’d have to use Xero (which in every other respect I find a lot less attractive than FreeAgent)

Just to let everyone know that multi-currency invoicing is finally live!!

You can read about the details here:

http://www.freeagentcentral.com/centr...

and there are some new articles (and video tutorials) in the Knowledge Base here:

http://www.freeagentcentral.com/suppo...

Thank you for being so patient, and do let me know your feedback. This is phase one of our multi-currency support and there is still more to do.

This looks great - sorry to nitpick, but any chance of multi-currency expenses soon?

Robin,

Just to clarify what you're needing here: just the ability to enter a foreign currency out-of-pocket expense, which hasn't gone through your UK bank account or credit card and therefore already been converted into Pounds?

Or are you needing Foreign Currency bank accounts too?

I would be very happy to see Foreign Currency bank accounts soon, as my customer pays into my foreign currency account.
By the way: The recently added foreign currency support for invoices works great! Well done!

Thanks

Ed,

Here's the situation:

• Main account is in GBP


• Client needs billing in EUR


• Project is in EUR

I need to:

• Create expenses in GBP and bill them in EUR (eg. flight to Europe bought in UK)


• Create expenses in EUR and bill them in EUR (eg. incidental expenses, paid for in cash in EUR whilst in Europe)


• Create expenses that were paid for in EUR on a GBP credit card (transaction in EUR, appears on my credit card statement in GBP, needs to be billed in EUR)

I'll probably need to do a similar thing for USD too.

R.

Hi
I checking the suitability of free agent for some of my clients in Canada. Because of Canada's proximity to the US and its ties to the UK all my clients deal with multi currencies in their invoices. Free agent has a excellent feature to prepare quotations or estimates. Unfortunately I can not use the software because all my clients charge there customers in Canadian or US $s and many times in Pound sterling and the Euro. Due to globalisation even small businesses need to do business across borders to thrive.

Regards,

Mukesh Tanna
www.tannaca.com
mukesh@tannaca.com

I'm trying to do something simple. I've just done a trip to Europe, so I have a mixture of expenses in GBP and EUR, and I have to bill in EUR. I have one GBP bank account. I don't see that I can do this without some kind of workaround like submitting an invoice per currency (which just looks unprofessional).

Either I'm missing something obvious or FA really isn't helping.

NickD, mmcgrath, Robin,

We're hearing you loud and clear, and I can say with certainty that multi-currency banking, expenses and bills are moving their way inexorably up our roadmap.

Decisions about feature priority is always a complex balancing act and we have some headline changes we need to make first. We're also constantly working to grow the development team and accelerate our pace of improvement, but beyond that I'm afraid I can't promise any specific dates.