Does your business deal with multiple currencies? Do you have trouble keeping your multi-currency settings up to date? Spire and Edge IMS can help with some useful multi-currency settings in Spire and our very own custom automation tool!
Spire has a great multi-currency setting that, when enabled, allows a company to operate in other currencies besides their base currency used for General Ledger (GL) reporting (typically Canadian dollars). This allows for invoices to be sent to customers and payments accepted in the customer’s own currency, as well as purchase orders sent to vendors and payments made in their currency. When these transactions get posted to the GL, the base currency debit or credit amounts are calculated using the current exchange rate along with the foreign amounts. For AR and AP, all items are entered in the foreign value and posted using the rate at the time. If the rate changes when the item is paid, the difference is posted to the gain/loss GL account set for the currency.
Current exchange rates can be set for each currency in the Currency Rates Table, along with monthly rates and preferred formatting. Monthly rates can be entered for each month within the three open fiscal periods, although these rates are not used when posting transactions. They are only referenced when using Spire’s Currency Revaluation function for GL foreign currency accounts.
Because currency rates are always fluctuating, there is a currency revaluation function available in Spire that recalculates the Canadian equivalent of foreign currency GL account balances. When you run the revaluation process, the balance in each account posted in a foreign currency will be revalued using the rate for the period. Running this function will more accurately report the Canadian value of foreign currency accounts. Before running the revaluation process, it is important to update, not only the monthly rate, but the daily exchange rate for each currency as well.
If you have trouble remembering to update exchange rates in Spire, Edge has developed an automated process that will update both the main rate and monthly rates on a schedule, such as daily or weekly, without the need to remember to do it. By taking advantage of RSS feeds released regularly by foreign exchange websites, including the Bank of Canada, any foreign currency exchange rates in Spire can be automatically updated in the background. If you are interested in learning more about keeping your multi-currency settings up to date and how our custom automation can work for you, we would be happy to discuss your options.
As always, feel free to check out our other blogs for some valuable tips!