Switching to multi-currency

[simon123]

Hi,

I have a Sage 50 company set up without Foreign Trader, but which trades in a few foreign currencies. Most transactions are handled by the ERP system, which pushes sales invoice and purchase invoice data to Sage 50 converted into GBP.

This set-up is causing problems as manual work is required to generate customer statements (these are generated by Sage 50, but need to be converted back to the actual invoice currency before they can be issued to the customer). Hence the decision has been taken to move to a finance system that supports multi-currency.

My understanding of switching on Foreign Trader in Sage 50 is that we will have to:

• Create new bank accounts for all non-GBP bank accounts currently set up

• Create new customer accounts for all customers that we invoice in a currency other than GBP

• Create new supplier accounts for all suppliers that invoice us in a currency other than GBP

And in the short-term there will be pain whilst customers have balances on their old account they haven't cleared as well as on their new account.

I am not anticipating the transition to be particularly easy, so I am looking for:

• Any tips and tricks to make this easier

• Any pitfalls that I need to avoid

Additionally, I have considered whether we should start a new Sage 50 company, setting up multi-currency from scratch, transferring opening balances in the correct currency, etc. Is this overkill? I know there would be more work, but in some ways it would be cleaner.

Grateful for all input,

Thanks,

Simon

[brucedenney]

Rock and hard place...

I would roll with what you have.

You seem to have a grasp on the situation.

What you can do...if you want to clean things up is to transfer the invoices form the old base currency account onto the new currency account.

Set up a 999x account as a control for the transfer

Issue Credit notes for all the base currency account invoice transactions, and corresponding invoices for the currency account transactions, make sure you set the exchange rate perfectly to have them match in base currency. (You could just do one "lump" amount to be the balance if you like) then you work in currency only going forwards.

Do it all with exports and imports to avoid mistakes, you can backup first do a dry run and reset if needed.

Mark all the old obsolete base currency accounts inactive and hide them from view.
Transfer the Base Currency foreign bank account balances to the new foreign currency bank accounts and hid the old ones.

Bank reconciliation and account management should be much easier going forward.