Book Keeping Task/Consolidated currency exchange

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[edit] Bills in Foreign Currency

Some of the bills that Pincher SAR receives are in another currency. For instance Phone.com bills are in US dollars.

We don't know exactly how much these bills will be in Canadian dollars until we actually pay them.

Fortunately QuickBooks Online allows us to set up accounts in foreign currencies. The Phone.com is set up in US dollars. This means we can enter the bills into QuickBooks in the same amounts we read on the bills.

[edit] Bill payments

When we pay a foreign currency bill from a Canadian currency account, QuickBooks will prompt us to enter the exchange rate.

For Phone.com, we typically pay the bill on our Mastercard and the statement includes the exchange rate used for that transaction.

[edit] Consolidated payments

Sometimes several bills will be paid with a single charge on the credit card (or chequing account). This sometimes causes problem with rounding errors.

Say Phone.com bills US$1.00 in May and also US$1.00 in June. To save money on processing fees, Phone.com only charges our Mastercard when the outstanding balance reaches a certain amount. So it doesn't process a payment in May, but processes US$2.00 in June.

Say that exchange comes out as CAD$2.25.

QuickBooks online will prompt for the exchange rate and represent that amount as CAD$1.12 for May and CAD$1.12 for June. A total of CAD$2.24 and out by CAD$0.01 in rounding. (Equally bad would be if it represented the amount as CAD$1.13 in both months.)

The problem is that QuickBooks Online is representing the exchange on each split of the bill payment transaction, rather than on the total.

To work around this we can explicitly represent the consolidation of the foreign currency amounts as a separate transaction from the exchange.

Instead of paying the bills from a Canadian dollar account, we pay them from a US dollar account. That way the US dollars are lumped together as one consolidated total. For instance, we can have a QuickBooks account called "ATB Mastercard US$ Consolidation", which is a credit card, and represents the US arm of our ATB Mastercard. The bills are paid from this account, and consolidate as a US$2.00 balance owing.

Then separately we represent the exchange rate. We transfer from the Canadian dollar credit card account to the US Dollar credit card account. At the specified exchange rate US$2.00 is paid off and CAD$2.25 is owing.

[edit] Fund accounting

A similar principle applies to Fund Accounting.

Say in July there's a single bill for US$2.00 which is charged and the exchange is again CAD$2.25.

But say US$1.00 of the bill has been given the class "Casino General" and the other US$1.00 has the class "Casino Admin", representing two different funds.

In that case, we'll want to have 2 separate payments, one for each class. But the exchange will either be CAD$1.12 or CAD$1.13 each, giving a rounding error.

Ultimately we want to charge CAD$1.12 to one fund, and CAD$1.13 to the other. We choose which one it's going to be, and try to be consistent. (For example, we may reason that "Casino Admin" has more strict rules than "Casino General", so it will be the smaller amount.)

We pay from the corresponding fund subaccount of the Canadian Mastecard. We may have to calculate the exchange rate to give us the precise US dollar amount. E.g. CAD$1.12/US$1.00 = 1.1200, vs. CAD$1.13/US$1.00 = 1.1300.

If the payment instead was a consolidation of two or more months, then we would use subaccounts of "ATB Mastercard US$ Consolidation", one for each fund.

[edit] Shortcuts

Sometimes we can get lucky and there's no rounding error when the consolidated exchange amount is split between each contributing amount. If you know that's the case, there's no need to use the foreign currency consolidation account; you can just pay the foreign bill directly from the Canadian dollar account.

This of course applies when there is nothing to consolidate -- when there is only a single amount and a single bill being paid.