As soon as you activate multi-currency for invoicing in BigTime, a few changes to your Invoicing overview page will take place. While your DRAFTS/FINALS tile and A/R AGING tile will remain unchanged, you’ll now see two ARROWS on either side of your WORK-IN-PROGRESS tile. These arrows will allow you to toggle between your aggregated WIP invoice amounts in each currency your firm uses. The other two tiles will continue to only show amounts in your base currency.
In the example below, we can see that the WIP invoice amount our firm has created in its base currency of USD is $16,400.
However, our firm also works with clients in Europe and calculates their invoices in Euros. To see the WIP invoice amounts for those clients, we’ll click one of the arrows on either side of the tile. Now we can see our firm also has €3,200 in WIP invoices for those clients.
When we click on the WIP tile, we’ll be able to see details for all our invoices in all our currencies, regardless of the currency that was displayed on our WIP tile. Enabling the CURRENCY field in this view will show you which currency is linked to each invoice. If your firm uses currencies that share a symbol (for example, USD and CAD, which both use the $ symbol) adding the CURRENCY field will be useful for differentiating between them. There are other filters specific to multi-currency invoicing that you can add to your invoice details window – read this article to learn about them.
You don’t need to follow any special workflow to create a multi-currency invoice. After you activate the feature and set currencies for your clients and projects, BigTime will automatically calculate each client’s invoice in their default currency. This means you can follow the same steps to create a draft invoice in your base currency to create a multi-currency invoice.
When you click the FINALIZE button in your multi-currency invoice creation window, you’ll be taken to the window where you’ll make final edits to your invoice. If you’re working on an invoice in a foreign currency, you’ll see a few new fields appear near the bottom of this window. Instead of one SUBTOTAL field, there will now be two: one in your client’s currency, and one for your base currency. There will also be an EXCHANGE RATE field, where you’ll see the exchange rate between the two currencies. The EXCHANGE RATE field is date-specific, and is determined by the date of your invoice and the exchange rate you set in your currency list. Alternately, you can set your own custom exchange rates and their applicable start and end dates in your EDIT CURRENCY window, and have BigTime pull those exchange rates for your invoices. To learn about setting date ranges for your exchange rates, read this article.
The EXCHANGE RATE field is editable. If, for whatever reason, you make a change to the value in the EXCHANGE RATE field, the base currency SUBTOTAL field will recalculate to reflect this change.
You can send a multi-currency invoice to a client the same way you’d send any other invoice. Make sure to double check that your invoice reflects the correct currency in your invoice PREVIEW tab before sending it to your client.
If you’d like to post a multi-currency invoice to your accounting system, you can follow the same steps you would to post any other invoice. When you post an invoice in a foreign currency to your accounting system, it will only post the amount in your client's currency. It won't post the invoice amount converted into your base currency. If you have multi-currency for invoicing and billing activated in your accounting system, the exchange rate on that invoice will also carry over from BigTime.