QTRACA holds your documents in the currency you traded in, and records what that was worth in your own currency at the time. Two small setup tables do the work: Currencies lists the currencies you deal in, and FX Rates holds the exchange rates used to value foreign-currency documents.
Where to find them: Currencies and FX Rates under Setup → Orders in the main menu.
Your base currency
Your account has a base currency — the currency your business reports in. Every foreign-currency document is converted back to it for reporting, and it is the currency used when nothing else supplies one.
It is set in Account Settings, and defaults to NZD where it has not been changed.
Currencies
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Code | The three-letter code, such as NZD or AUD. It must be exactly three characters and can only appear once. |
| Name | The currency’s full name, for people rather than the system. |
| Symbol | What is shown against amounts. |
| Decimals | How many decimal places the currency uses — between 0 and 6. Most are 2; currencies without minor units are 0. |
| Active | Retire a currency you no longer trade in without removing it from historical documents. |
A starter set of currencies is created with your account, so in most cases there is nothing to add.
FX rates
A rate says what one currency was worth in another, on a given day.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Rate Date | The day the rate applies from. |
| From / To | The pair. The two must be different currencies. |
| Rate | The multiplier, which must be greater than zero. |
| Source | Manual where you keyed it, or Imported where it came from elsewhere. |
You can hold one rate per pair per date. Entering a second rate for the same pair on the same day is rejected, so there is never a question of which of two rates applied.
How a document picks its rate
You do not type an exchange rate onto a document. It is looked up when totals are calculated:
- The document’s currency is compared with your base currency. If they are the same, the rate is 1 and nothing further happens.
- Otherwise the system finds the most recent rate dated on or before the document’s own date — its issue date, order date, bill date or dispatch date as applicable.
- The rate and the date it was applied are saved onto the document, so a later rate movement never rewrites what an existing document was worth.
A rate stays in force until you enter a newer one. You do not need a rate for every day — enter one when it changes, and it carries forward.
If no rate exists on or before the document date, the rate used is 1. The document still saves, and it is valued as though the two currencies were equal — which for most pairs is wrong. Nothing warns you. Enter your rates before raising foreign-currency documents, and if a converted figure looks implausible, check whether a rate was in place on that date.
Which currency a document uses
A new document takes its currency from the party it is for — the customer on a sales order, the supplier on a purchase order — and falls back to your base currency where they have none.
Sales orders released from a sales contract are the exception worth knowing: a contract carries no currency of its own, so a released order has nothing to inherit and lands on the account base currency.
Things to know
- Rates are directional. A rate from one currency to another is not automatically the inverse in the other direction — enter the direction your documents actually need, which is your trading currency to your base currency.
- Price lists must match the customer’s currency. Pricing does not convert between currencies; it refuses the mismatch instead. See How prices are decided.
- Deactivating a currency does not disturb documents already raised in it.