Foreign currency cash withdrawals

Accounting
1

Hi all,

I have trouble properly accounting for cash withdrawals in a foreign currency, where bank fees are involved.

Example:
I have used my debit card to get 50 EUR cash. Exchange rate makes that 48.56 EUR, and my bank took 2 GBP foreign currency transaction fee, crediting my bank account with a total of 50.56 GBP. So far, so good.

Since I pay things with EUR in cash, I have set up a EUR petty cash account. Now I can tag the bank transaction from my current account to the EUR petty cash account, resulting in a 50 EUR to 52.56 GBP transaction - but I can’t split that transaction to reflect that the bank took 2 GBP charges, no can I attach receipts to that!

I can’t use a manual journal, because that (to my knowledge) doesn’t support currency conversion, and accounts in the company default currency only anyway.

How do I account for the 2 GBP bank charges properly in this and future cases?

Thanks,
Michel

2

I’d split the transaction manually - delete the £52.56 transaction that was imported from your bank feed and create two new ones in its place for £50.56 and £2, tag the £2 as charges and the £50.56 as a transfer as per normal.

This is fine from an accounting perspective as the totals still line up, but if you prefer to keep the current account in QuickFile as an exact mirror of your bank statement then you’d need to introduce a dummy holding bank account, tag the £52.56 as a transfer to there, then put the separate £50.56 and £2 transactions into the holding account to bring it back to zero (this is what I do to handle my Euro payments using TransferWise).

3

Yep, thanks, did that. I just don’t like the extra overhead.

Wish I could add some common bank transaction templates to reflect exactly that in the tagging screen…