Multicurrency - Use buy/sell exchange rates instead of mid-rate
Use buy/sell exchange rates instead of mid-rate when generating invoice items from bill items that have been assigned to a customer.
Currently when entering a bill in foreign currency you have ability to assign the expense to a customer.
When generating a corresponding invoice the mid-rate from XE.com is used to convert the bill item FX amount into home currency. The mid-rate is always inherently wrong, as nobody has the ability to buy or sell currency at that rate.
This means that we have to manually find the correct buy exchange rate, do a calculation and then change the amount in the invoice.
We could edit exchange rate but that is more painful and affects accounting as well.
We propose that Xero should use the buy rate for the bill-assign-invoice conversion process. This makes it less likely that our businesses lose money by using incorrect exchange rates.
Ashlin Redpath
shared this idea
Hi Ashlin, thanks for sharing this idea. We can see how having the option to use buy and sell exchange rates, rather than a mid-market rate, could provide more accurate foreign currency reporting for businesses that transact internationally.
Currently, Xero uses a mid-market exchange rate by default, although you can manually override the exchange rate on individual foreign currency invoices and bills when needed.
I've updated the status of this idea to Gaining Support so we can continue tracking interest from the community. If there are particular multi-currency workflows or transactions where this has the biggest impact, let us know as those examples help us better understand the feature.
