Happy days! Am starting a new company file now. My accountant has recommended using USD as the base currency since it is said that it will be valid until at least 2030.
ZiG starts at a rate of 13.56. What an odd number.
So am reading all the guides on exporting and importing customers and the like. Don’t know if anybody in authority has really thought this whole thing through.
Yup and then the whole performance to get the fiscal divice to work again with the new invoices
Thanks, that’s good to hear. That would be my preference too. We do more than 99% of our transactions in USD, and I don’t see that changing much.
The easiest might be to make a copy of your current business and batch delete the transactions. I’ve seen that method recommended on the forum. Or it should also be simple enough to do a batch update to export all your customers and batch create to add them to the new business. I need to set aside a day to do all of this too.
I don’t think the ones making the legislation are the ones having to implement it and deal with the consequences!
I have received a letter from one of my suppliers saying they will go on with zwl invoices till 25 April payable in ZiG. They will then start their new system effective 1 May. I think I will follow suit
I have successfully changed our base currency to USD. It took pretty much two days’ of work, but it seems to all be working as expected now, a few weeks later.
Having seen recent comments by @lubos that the new method for entering starting balances is to recreate the transactions themselves or a journal entry, I decided that it would be easier to convert our current business and change transaction and account currencies rather than try to establish starting balances and transactions in a new business for all 2,000+ inventory items that we have, some of which have purchase history going back several years. I have kept a backup of the ZWL business file from before the introduction of our new ZiG currency, so that is available for auditing and cross checking any unexpected results.
Configuring the new currencies in most parts of Manager was fairly straightforward. The batch update functionality meant I could change our customer and supplier accounts fairly easily. The bank and cash accounts and employee accounts were also easy enough, as there are not very many of them. It can get confusing, but with careful attention and checks against the balances of the backup business it went fairly smoothly. The most time-consuming part was updating exchange rates and entering new ones. Part of this is unavoidable with the way Manager currently works, but there is one change which would have saved me a lot of time and I think could be fairly simple to implement:
Once I had updated or entered all the necessary exchange rates, I still had to update the transactions that used these exchange rates. This is simple enough if you are doing it for one or two days, but I had to do it for all 600+ rates. This means clicking on the transaction count for each rate, batch updating all the transactions for that rate, and then going back and doing the same for every other rate. It is tedious, and easy to lose one’s place and potentially miss a rate. It would be great if there could be a way to batch update all transactions to use the rate for the date of the transaction in a single operation.
Here’s hoping we aren’t forced to change our base currency again soon. I really don’t want to have to go through all of that again.
I agree, though the process you describe was an improvement over its direct predecessor, the whole spot rate exchange rate introduction increased the work load for users who relied on standard exchange rates.
Tbh, I have given up on updating exchange rates as per tax authority figures since shifting responsibility to my clients is much easier and cost efficient than uploading standard rates and then manually batch updating 90 times every quarter – which none of them seem to be doing at the moment.
I agree, for those who rely on standard rates–which I are more in number than spot rate guys, a smarter Batch Update button to update all dates within a given period each with its corresponding exchange rate would be a relief.
It all depends. Countries such as Zimbabwe but also others such as Nigeria have significant daily exchange rate fluctations and month to month can be very signficant sometimes loosing more than 50% of the initial rate. I am very happy with the current system and did not like the old one. The currency revaluations are very easy to use and helpful.
I agree with @GrahamvdR that maybe @Lubos could look into some kind of shortcut when like in Zimbabwe the base currency changes. I want to note though that this is an exceptional situation and wonder if it is worth the effort to change Manager for cases that took 2 days but maybe some other accounting app would even take longer to adjust to a peculiar situation.
I can surmise that my intentions were not clear.
I’m not at all against the introduction of spot exchange rates, I think it’s a valuable addition. What I’m against though are those 90 batch updates.
The current system could still work if it can manage to update any arbitrary number of exchange rates in a single routine.