If your firm plans to pursue new projects and secure clients internationally, you’ll need the right tools to support expense tracking in multiple currencies. BigTime anticipates those needs with a multi-currency for expenses sub-feature that gives firms the power to record expenses in any global currency and convert it into their base currency. With it, companies have the freedom to achieve growth beyond the limits of borders.
To illustrate the value of multi-currency for expenses, we’ll walk you through an example of how the sub-feature could be used by a growing firm to track expenses incurred in foreign countries and currencies.
NOTE: The multi-currency for expenses sub-feature is only available at the Advanced, Premier and Projector levels. To learn about BigTime’s packages, take a look at this article.
Multi-Currency for Expenses In Action
Let’s say you run an architecture and construction firm out of Buffalo, New York. Your firm designs and builds apartment complexes and other structures throughout the United States, but some of your clients are real estate developers in Canada. Below, you’ll learn how you could use BigTime’s multi-currency sub-feature to convert an expense from Canadian dollars into your firm’s home currency of USD. The sub-feature will use the exchange rate set between the two currencies to automatically calculate the new expense amount for you.
One of your staffers, Julia, travels to Toronto to meet with one of these international clients. She schedules a lunch meeting to discuss the plans for a building that the client is commissioning, where she ends up spending CAD $70. When she returns to Buffalo, Julia needs to make a record of the expense and submit it to be approved. But first, she needs to convert the amount she spent in Canadian dollars into your firm’s base currency of USD so she can be properly reimbursed for the cost.
With multi-currency for expenses, Julia won’t have to break out the calculator to convert her expense from CAD to USD. BigTime can automatically find the exchange rate and do it for her.
If your firm has multi-currency for expenses enabled, Julia will see a new field in the expense entry window where she can indicate a currency type. This field will default to whatever your firm’s base currency is – in this case, USD.
She can click on the GRAY ARROW to generate a picklist with every available currency, or she can type directly into the text box to search for her desired currency.
When she changes the currency from your firm’s base currency to USD, two new fields will generate: the exchange rate between the two currencies, and the amount converted into your base currency. BigTime pulls exchange rates for all currencies from xe.com on a daily basis, so the exchange rate she sees reflects the accurate exchange rate for that day. When she enters the expense amount of CAD $70 into the AMOUNT box, BigTime will automatically use the most recent exchange rate to convert that value into your base currency. Now, when Julia submits her expense, her managers can see that they’ll need to reimburse her for $52.33 USD.
Now that you can see how multi-currency for expenses works in a real life context, you can begin learning about how you can adopt it for your firm. Take a look at some of the articles below to get started.