Why does Quickbooks make it so hard to handle foreign currency invoices?
So I've come across from Xero that I started using 6 years ago. Lots to improve on but one thing they got 100% bang on was settling invoices in foreign currencies - it was super easy and you do the matching and reconciliation in one step.
The neat thing I loved about Xero's handling of this is that they retained a "Resolve Difference" button that allowed you to quickly work out how much bank and exchange fees were paid in relation to a payment in a foreign currency to a foreign currency invoice, add the fee on the same page as the incoming payment based on a user-selected exchange rate and instantly work out whether the amounts reconciled with the bank statement, all in one step.
Quickbooks makes us do multiple steps with the use of a calculator and separate excel sheet to work out the fee calculations and a dummy account to actually pull off this whole mess.
Quickbooks does 3 things wrong in their implementation:
1. The auto-calculation of the exchange rate forces you to manually add negative transactions to the bank deposit - you need to pull a calculator out to work out the fees in potentially different currencies while cross checking your local currency bank statement to confirm the sums add up. Think about that for a second - you need to use a calculator to use online accounting software. I'm sorry, that's bonkers crazy but that is exactly what Quickbooks is forcing users to do.
2. Apparently, their "workaround" is for users to create a "Undeposited Funds" account as an intermediary step and add the customer payment to that account first, add separate transactions for the exchange and bank fees and then transfer from that dummy account to your real bank account. Why does Quickbooks need us to create a dummy account when they could easily do this in the background like literally everyone else?
3. Quickbooks has disabled the "Resolve Payment" function for foreign currency transactions. That makes no sense. I just need to see the delta, record that as Bank and Exchange Fee and I could be done in 30 seconds instead of the 20 min I need messing around with multiple transactions, manual transactions (Add Payment, Add Deposit, calculate the delta, reverse engineer delta into foreign currency etc etc) and still needing to do a separate reconciliation.
It doesn't need to be this way. This is easy to fix I think so I'm asking Quickbooks:
Please restore the "Resolve Difference" feature for foreign currency transactions and allow users to control the exchange rate without the auto-calculation override by Quickbooks (which is never accurate because it never reflects the actual rate applicable to the transaction. This creates all sorts of downstream problems including messing up unrealised and realised forex gains/losses.
Please build the basic functionality so users don't need to create a dummy account to handle intermediary steps for forex transactions. Your competitors worked it out over 5 years ago - get with the program!