I have a quick question regarding the source of exchange rates in QuickFile. Reading the forums, I understand that QF uses xe.com, but there is a discrepancy with the historical rates listed on the website.
For example, take November 22, 2016. In QF I get a rate of 1.2494 while in the historical rates listed on xe.com I find a rate of 1.2427 (source: http://www.xe.com/currencytables/?from=GBP&date=2016-11-22 - note that this is taken from 17:00 UTC). The HMRC rate for November 2016 is 1.2293.
This isn’t super critical, but it would be nice to be able to manually generate consistent exchange rates, or at least document their source properly. On a large invoice, the difference between the QF rate and the xe.com rate can make a noticeable difference to the realised currency variation.
I guess that this may simply be a timing difference, but please can you confirm the source of your exchange rates?
I read on here a while back that they capture the rate from XE in the early hours of the morning rather than at 17:00 (so they have a rate to apply to invoices created during that day), which may be enough to account for the difference.
@ian_roberts is correct, we grab a spot rate in the early hours of the morning for that day. This is generally more preferable than using minute by minute rates. The historic rates are calculated retrospectively and are based on an average for that day.
Thank you both for your replies. I definitely agree that a single rate for the day is more useful that using minute-by-minute rates.
@QFMathew, please could you just clarify your last sentence? Are you referring to the historical rates on xe.com; or the historical rates when creating an invoice/purchase in QF? i.e., if I today create a purchase on the 1st February 2017, will the automatic exchange rate be from the rate that you grabbed in the morning of the 1st, or an average over the day?
Finally, is there a way to query the rates that QF uses for a given day without creating an invoice?
Yes sorry, I mean XE.com work out these average later and publish them on their site. We only take that morning rate and make no further alterations.
There isn’t I’m afraid, we could potentially look at providing a historic lookup tool, but I don’t believe it has come up before so it may be worth posting separately as a feature request.
You could maybe try logging a prepayment for some client/supplier in the target currency for the relevant date, that should show you the rate and then you can cancel before you actually save anything.
Thank you both for your input. I will raise a separate feature request for this as I believe that it could be very useful.
It would also be useful to be able to get this data from the API - there was another post on here that I think could have benefited from this, but I can’t find it now.
Following up here, this user seems like they could have used the ability to get exchange rates through the API:
There are a lot of posts on here about exchange rates and foreign currency (it’s one of the more complicated aspects of QF - not a criticism, I think you’ve implemented it well, it’s just a complicated aspect of accounting), and having a tool to quickly show the exchange rate for a given date could save a lot of confusion.
Even if it was just possible through the API, that would be fine for me.