Creating expenses in foreign currency

[rub1e]

As a reconciler of expenses AND as a submitter of expenses, I would like to be able to raise expenses claims in foreign currency directly

• Upgrade account in Xero to premium
• Document process - here

Split out from #383

[iteles]

👍 To document our reasoning:
Xero Premium costs an additional £5.50 per month, £66 a year and it will cost us more than that in dwyler time to do the conversions ourselves for dwyler summer receipts alone!

[iteles]

FYI I'm making this a priority 2 as we have some receipts in €€ to put in from our last dwyl HQ trip to Portugal and assigning myself as I'm the only one with access to upgrade for step one! 😬

[iteles]

Upgraded! Step 1 complete.

[rub1e]

I've added Euro & $$ to our account, but the option's not there for expenses - so I've sent in a support request

[rub1e]

Xero isn't currently set up to do non-base currency expenses 💸 , but we can get around this by creating bills instead of an expense claim.

However please note that Xero uses historical currency conversion rates 💹 for old receipts so the foreign money transaction 💶 matches up with the £ 💷 amount coming out of the bank account 🏦

This means that we need to group these expenses by date - i.e. create a new bill for each day of expenses

In practice, however, it's not the end of the world if we create one single bill for a two week period like dwyl summer 🇵🇹 because the exchange rate isn't likely to have fluctuated enough to have a significant effect (and discrepancies can be accounted for using Xero's rounding function.

• Create a new invoice and select the relevant currency from the currency dropdown (see above)
• Using your phone's camera or the Xero app, take a photo of each receipt and name it according to the following convention:
  • {account}-{date}-{amount}-{description}
  • account will be e.g. Braga or dwyl-summer or Thomas Cook
  • Date is important (see above)
  • Description should be minimal - e.g. "food"
• Just upload the files to the file library, rather than attaching them to an expense claim
  
• Once all receipts are stored, add each one from the file library to the blank bill you've created
  • This is why the naming convention is so important - you can populate each line of the invoice from the filename, rather than having to go into each PDF 😩

[iteles]

The 'Client' will be dwyl-summer or a client name, but will the account be International Travel across the board? Maybe a question for the accountants #451

[iteles]

We ended up with {date}-{amount}-{description}--{client}

But this process works! 👍