I posted awhile ago when Xero rolled out multi-currency so it’s only fair to do a wrap up of the latest multi-currency entries. Both FreshBooks and FreeAgentCentral announced this month the availability of their multi currency functionality.
The FreeAgent offering is really slick, including on the fly calculation of daily unrealized and realized gains and losses on these invoices between the date of the invoice and the date customer payment is received. Like Xero, FreeAgent have opted to use the forex codes from XE.com – as the biggest exchange rate publisher – this makes sense.
FreshBooks has done a nice job of multicurrency also, their rates are populated from the Bank of Canada but their approach isn’t dynamic, rather it averages exchange rate data over a period of time. They don’t have an intro video but have written a FAQ page for more details. Interestingly, with FreshBooks if you have invoiced someone in a currency that is different from your default currency, then you can only enable online payments if you are using PayPal.
The FreshBooks approach is to mainly separate reporting by currency. While this makes life easier for them, it does make it harder for a business to get a really clear picture of their position – however at least P&L and tax show aggregate figures.
It seems the FreshBooks announcement came a little out of the blue, if this post is anything to go by.
All in all it’s interesting to see that multi currency is becoming almost a non-negotiable requirement, even for the smaller end of the SMB market – yet another feature that all vendors need to plan for…
