Help with foreign invoices

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Wed Dec 3 09:44:41 EST 2014


>
>The problem comes when I try and marked the invoice as paid. My clients
>accept the invoices in $ but pays straight to my UK account in £. It should
>be easy to do in GnuCash, but it just doesn't work.
>
>  
>
I can see fascinating complications with this (complications that make 
"work" hard to define)

To take just one potential problem, what is your arrangement about 
equality of payment? Is that to be the exchange rate at the time they 
make the payment, the time it arrived in your bank account, the time at 
which you are marking the invoice paid, etc. Of course in your case that 
these are potential problems might not be so obvious with the rate 
between $ and £ comparatively stable. But the general case of your 
problem could involve currencies with rates changing daily.

You might need a work around. If you have an agreement with those paying 
the invoices to accept their amount (as being equal, irrespective of the 
actual exchange rate at that instant) maybe try a pseudo bank account 
(in dollars) where you mark the invoice paid to that followed by a 
transfer to the real account in pounds split to a currency gains and 
losses account to make things balance (I think gnucash could tell you 
what that out of balance was according to the instant exchange rate).

Maybe just an aside, but most of the discussions we have been having 
here involving multiple currencies within the same set of books have 
ignored the potential complications of what is being agreed/assumed 
about exchange rates. In other words, what is the POLICY as to how and 
when valuations occur (and what are the requirements of various 
jurisdictions in this regard).

Michael


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