How to enter multi-currency in Starting Balance.

Andy00Koo

Hi, hope someone can help me.

My background situation is as follows: We are a Malaysian company, the accounts currency are in Ringgit Malaysia (RM). My company sells goods to a customer overseas and our customer pays us an advance deposit upon placing an order based on our quotation. However, we do not bill the customer until delivery of the goods. All transactions relating to this customer is in USD. Our financial year end is October. the payment is recorded in a holding account in the Balance Sheet current liability section.

Our customer paid us USD12,091.50 or RM48,796.46 in October as deposit for an order to be delivered in December.

In Wave, I have designated the customer as a USD invoice customer and I have billed the customer the full invoice amount of USD24,183.00 in December. The customer has also paid us the balance of USD12,091.50 in December.

In starting balances I had entered the deposit amount into a holding account (BS liability) as RM48,796.46. (note: this is a new company).

Previously, our book were in Excel and we did our currency conversion manually.

My problem is now that I am using Wave, I am don't know how go about offsetting the Ringgit Malaysia (RM) amount in the holding account against my USD Debtor account.

Alexia

Hi @Andy00Koo.

When you set up a payment account in Wave on the Chart of Accounts page, you have the option to choose its currency. This will allow you to keep track of bank accounts in different currencies, for example. All other account will default to your business' default currency.

Whenever you use a foreign currency account to record an expense, Wave will convert it automatically to your business' default currency, using the mid-market rates from xe.com.

Here's how I would recommend accounting for this entire process, from invoice creation.

• First, create your invoice.
• Record the deposit as a partial payment to that invoice, choosing the bank account it was deposited to as the account.
• Record a payment for the other half of the invoice, choosing your holding account as the payment account. This will record your invoice as paid and will exchange USD to RM in your second account automatically, according to the exchange rate of the date of the deposit.
• Create an income transaction when payment is deposited in your bank account.
• Categorize this transaction as a "Transfer from credit card, bank or loan", and choose your holding account as the account to expense from. Wave will create an expense of the amount of the received payment to your holdings account at the exchange rate of the date of the transfer.

Note that Wave's multi-currency support is limited right now, but we are working on a host of new features to make managing the accounts businesses like yours easier. I can't give you a timeline of when those features will be released, but our engineers are hard at work.