Automatic (Recurring) Forex Exchange Rates

Currently, Manager.io allows us to activate web service - Exchange rates and add forex.manager.io to fetch exchange rates. And also it allows us to input exchnage rate with a date. It would be useful if it was possible to setup automatic (recurring) exchange rates. This way, for an organization that receives money in two or more currencies doesnt have to worry about always inputting a new exchange rate daily, it just fetches from the api, and input it every day at a set time. It is very important here on the time, since users of manager come from different backgrounds and locations.

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You can definetly do that. You can either:

  1. push information to Manager from another platform,

Or:

  1. Use a Manager Folder to run javascript to pull this information. You can create a Text Custom Field placed in Folders to inject your html and js code.
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Is there a way that this could be a feature included in manager? For non-techies.. like recurring reciepts, payments etc.. this also could be useful

Actually, two things need to be done to really make multi-currency shine in Manager.

1.) There is going to be option on each transaction to use either transaction exchange rate or “global” exchange rate. For most businesses, they will just want their multi-currency transactions to use global exchange rate.

2.) When you go to Settings, then Currencies then Exchange Rates, there will be option to pull the latest exchange rates from web service.

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This sounds great. But isn’t this what is happening now? The exchange rates are already being fetched from the web service. But it is tedious to add a new exchange rate everytime incase they changed.

Will the global exchange rate be updated automatically daily? This way he user can sit back and relax after checking the added box in the settings?

I’ve looked at almost every accounting product, and very few of them do multi-currency in a friendly way. Manager is pretty good. One thing I like about Quickbooks (yuck), is the way they do exchange rates:

  • The exchange rate is stored in each transaction
  • When creating a new transaction, based on the appropriate currency for the customer/vendor and posting date, it automatically fetches the rate and populates the rate field
  • I can accept that default, or override it to enter a custom rate
  • Later, from time to time, I can rebase the value against the native currency (a step which Manager does automatically)

Manager makes it much easier to go back and adjust rates in the past, simply by adding a new exchange rate in Settings, something QB really can’t do very well.

There’s also an issue in QB posting things for “tomorrow”, because the live rate isn’t known. Instead of just using today’s rate, or letting the system fill it in later, QB makes it impractical to post tomorrow’s transactions (like scheduled vendor payments tied to an automated payment tomorrow). Manager doesn’t have that problem, because it will constantly re-assess based on the rates in Settings.

So, the only thing I see missing from a usability standpoint in Manager is a live-lookup at the time of transaction entry/edit based on currency and date instead of relying on stuff in Settings.

But, in Settings, if instead of just pulling rates for today, it retrieves the rates for each day since the last update, then everything would just work correctly, and management of rates on a per-transaction basis would only be needed for very rare overrides (like when the vendor chooses the rate, instead of using bank rates).