You can, of course, operate a firm on a small scale and only work with local clients. But in an increasingly global economy, the chance to grow beyond borders by taking on international clients is too good for many companies to pass up. Taking your firm global can heighten your profile and bring in far more revenue – but it also makes your financial operations more complicated. If you have clients in multiple different countries, you’ll have to manage invoicing, billing, budgets and payments in each client’s home currency. That means manually recording transactions in both their currencies and yours. You’ll also have to research and update exchange rates between each currency every time you create an invoice or bill. On top of that, you’ll need to keep an up-to-date foreign currency journal so that all your financial records and reports are consistent.
Without technology to support you, all of this might eat up hours that could be spent on other, more important tasks. This is where BigTime can pick up the slack. BigTime offers access to multi-currency tools that automate many of the tedious and repetitive tasks listed above. With BigTime, it's possible for your firm to adopt and use an unlimited number of currencies for creating invoices, bills, payments and budgets. BigTime also pulls the most recent exchange rates for every currency from xe.com, so you no longer have to do that research on your own. The possibilities with BigTime’s multi-currency features are endless – we could keep listing them, but showing is better than telling. Read on to see an example of how a firm could leverage these tools in the real world.
Multi-Currency for Billing and Invoicing in Action
Charlie Brown runs PearSoft, a San Francisco-based software development firm that designs and builds apps for big tech clients. When he first founded his firm, he and his team of five developers only took on clients in the immediate Silicon Valley area. But over the years, the firm’s profile and reputation grew, and Charlie hired twenty new developers to keep up with demand. PearSoft now has the staff and bandwidth to work with global clients.
At first, all of PearSoft’s multi-currency invoicing and billing was handled manually. As the firm took on more international clients, Charlie began spending a bigger chunk of his time researching conversion rates and updating his currency journals. These repetitive administrative tasks were eating up valuable time that Charlie could have spent growing his firm. Through trial and error, Charlie realized his firm needed a technology tool to streamline the financial aspect of running a global firm.
He heard about BigTime’s multi-currency solutions, so he creates an account for his firm and activates the multi-currency for invoicing and billing feature. As a starting place, he decides to test the feature by creating an invoice for a tech client based in Tokyo. He set PearSoft’s base currency as USD, but his client uses Yen (JPY) to pay invoices, so he adds JPY to the list of currencies his firm invoices with. When he adds this currency to PearSoft’s currency list, BigTime automatically pulls the most recent exchange rate between USD and JPY – meaning Charlie no longer has to do the math on his own.
Now, he can edit his client’s settings to include JPY as their default currency.
This currency will now also be the default for any project PearSoft works on for that client. Any invoices, payments, bills and budgets created for this project will be automatically created in JPY.
Now that he’s configured his multi-currency settings, Charlie is ready to create an invoice for his client. Bill rates are automatically configured in a client's home currency, which in this case is JPY. On his drafted invoice, Charlie can see the invoice subtotal in both JPY and USD, as well as the appropriate exchange rate for the period recorded on the invoice.
This is only one example, but it illustrates how BigTime’s multi-currency for invoicing and billing feature can eliminate the hassle of manual currency conversion and record keeping. After a minimal-lift initial configuration, Charlie is now able to quickly and efficiently create invoices, budgets and payments in JPY. When PearSoft takes on more international clients later, Charlie can keep adding currencies to his firm’s roster and use them to keep accurate financial records. If you feel ready to adopt multi-currency invoicing and billing for your firm, you can check out some of the articles below to get started.
