Payments Made in Euros

I recently made a business trip from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland. I had to pay several motorway tolls that were paid in Euros. How do I account for this in my expenses? Should I just enter the Sterling value for that day. (€3.40 was £2.86 on that day) ??

I am a Sole Trader.

Hi @jeremygadd

If they’re one off trips, you may wish to just enter them in the GBP value.

However, recording in EUR would give you a clear record. The first thing to do is enable multi-currency and add EUR to your list. There’s a guide on that part here, which also shows you how to create the invoice in that currency too.

When it comes to tagging the payment, if you paid it from a GBP account, you will need to use the ‘Log Payment’ button on the invoice so it can calculate the exchange rate difference for you.

Hope that helps, but please let me know if you have further questions.

Thanks for the quick reply @QFMathew. This was a one off trip and I paid in coins so I suppose just log it as GBP value from Proprietor Drawings Account.

That should be fine. I would suggest using either xe.com or if you let me know the date, I’ll grab the EUR exchange rate for that date from our records. That way, if you create any foreign currency transactions in the future, they would all reference the same source (for consistency).

The good thing is, because you paid using cash rather than card, you wouldn’t need to log any fluctuations in the exchange rates (QuickFile can help you do this automatically with the multi-currency feature)

Yes, I used xe.com!

Related to this is also should I just do the same for the income I received as it was paid to me in Euros? (Cash)

You could do the same. Did you invoice them for the job in EUR or GBP, or was it just an agreed amount there and then?

Personally, I like the trail that using the multi-currency feature allows - shows the value in GBP and EUR, but as long as your accounts are correct, then I can’t see an issue with logging it directly in GBP.