Chart of Accounts - Ability to assign Foreign Currency to an account
I would like to be able to have a foreign currency account in the COA other than bank accounts. If an invoice is received and paid in a foreign currency, it should show as the foreign currency as the source, not the base currency. This affects loan accounts a lot and if invoices are paid from a loan account, instead of a bank account, you can't keep the currency consistent.
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Michael Fowlie commented
This is extremely important to me. I have foreign currency assets and liabilities and need to be able to understand my up to date balance sheet at today's FX rates each month.
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Mario Meyer commented
Working with assets coming from two different currencies than the company currency, as it did not allow me to change the currency from LAO Kip to USD when I registered the Xero account, and it looks like this thread has been running since 2022,,,what is the chance it will be given any regard now??
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Spencer McNally commented
Currently Xero allows bank accounts to be denominated in foreign currencies other than the base currency, but doesn’t allow this for other types of assets and liabilities
The net effect of this is that a business trading across multiple jurisdictions and multiple currencies cannot use Xero to produce accurate financial statements
For example, let’s say that I operate a hotel business and that I own properties in a number of different countries and currencies. Assume that my base currency is EUR but let’s say that I also trade in Mauritius (MRU).
Now assume that I want to buy a new hotel property in Mauritius. Xero allows me to transfer funds from my EUR bank account to my MRU bank account and reflect the transaction in the correct currencies, but the fixed asset account for the new property can only be denominated in EUR, which means that the value of the property is henceforth fixed in EUR when it should be fixed in MRU.
This means that if I subsequently pull a MRU-denominated balance sheet report for my MRU assets, and the EUR has (say) appreciated against the MRU in the interim, the reported MRU cost of the property will reduce when it should instead stay constant.
Among other things, this plays havoc with tax calculations, as the base cost of the asset changes every time the exchange rate changes.
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Anna Andreou commented
It would be great if Xero managed to upgrade to provide for this functionality. Maybe there is a way to create a "backstage" card which will keep the foreign currency, so you have in parallel General Ledger account in your chart of accounts in functional currency and linked to it card, which keeps the information of the transactions in the currency assigned to that card.
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Asharaf Ali commented
I will fully support this change. Because of our company's trading is mainly in USD, we need to keep USD as our base currency. But, most of our other balance sheet accounts are still transacted in SGD. So, if we have option to keep opening balances of those accounts too in non-base currencies, we can handle accounts better.
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Stephen Oliver commented
This would also be useful for VAT accounting where trading occurs within different jurisdictions (e.g. through branches in different countries).
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Gordon Leibbrandt commented
It is essential when managing subsidiaries in different countries
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Carl Gohringer commented
Fully support this change.
I was struggling to find a way to record a loan to another company in a foreign currency on the balance sheet.
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Sandey Wang commented
I think it is important to add foreign currency for any balance accounts, especially long term fixed assets, such as foreign properties, loans, investments.
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Magnus Lamprecht commented
In my opinion, in order to keep up with other product offerings out there it is essential that this functionality is brought in. Loans and certain assets are very often in other currencies, and keeping track of these manually outside of Xero is counter-productive to what Xero is trying to achieve in its full automation claims. Even small programs such as VT+ has this functionality.
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Accounts Continuum commented
We run multiple companies in different currencies that all have to be pulled together in GBP. On the old style reports you can change the currency for the P&L and BS to GBP but this is not possible on the new reports that we will have to use from July 2023.
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Rob Hollingsworth commented
It should be possible to open balance sheet accounts in foreign currencies so suppliers / customers accounts in foreign currencies can be posted to these. This would then give a consolidated view of how much is owed in each currency. Of course, on the balance sheet itself the values would be restated back to the base currency, but having foreign currency AP/AR accounts would make sure you can manage those currencies better. I know that QuickBooks has this functionality.