Selling in more than one currency

Every QuickBooks company has one home currency, chosen when the company file was created. It is the currency your reports, your balance sheet and your profit and loss are expressed in. It cannot be changed later.

TruSync reads your home currency from QuickBooks. You don’t set it anywhere in TruSync.

If every order you take is already in your home currency — a US store selling in USD into a USD QuickBooks company — nothing on this page applies to you. That is how most stores run and nothing changes for them.

It depends on whether Multicurrency is turned on in QuickBooks.

Multicurrency off. QuickBooks can only hold amounts in your home currency, so there is nowhere for a CAD 120.00 order to go. TruSync does not post it. The order is held as an Order Exception, shown as Currency Not Postable, with the order’s currency and your home currency named in the message. Nothing is written to QuickBooks.

TruSync holds the order rather than posting it because the alternative is worse. QuickBooks would accept CAD 120.00 and record it as USD 120.00 — the number survives, the currency doesn’t. That overstates your revenue, your tax and whatever cost of goods is matched against it, and it does so silently: once posted, there is nothing on the document to show it ever came from a Canadian sale. Finding and correcting those later means going back to the marketplace’s own order records.

Multicurrency on. QuickBooks can hold the order in its own currency, so TruSync posts it with the currency recorded on the document, along with the exchange rate for the order’s date.

Turning Multicurrency on is necessary, but it is not the only thing that has to be true. QuickBooks also has to give TruSync an exchange rate for the order’s date, and the customer TruSync posts the order against has to be in the order’s currency (see Customers and currencies). If either isn’t the case, the order is not posted and nothing is written to QuickBooks.

The rate TruSync uses is QuickBooks’ own — the same rate QuickBooks shows you if you enter a foreign transaction by hand, read for the date on the document rather than for today. If you’ve set your own rate for that day in QuickBooks, TruSync uses yours. It never makes one up.

This is a decision only you can make, inside QuickBooks, and it is worth reading twice before you make it: QuickBooks does not let you turn Multicurrency off again.

In QuickBooks Online, go to Settings → Account and settings → Advanced → Currency, and turn on Multicurrency.

Turning it on changes things beyond TruSync. It adds currency fields across QuickBooks, adds exchange-rate gain and loss accounts to your chart of accounts, and affects how your accountant closes your books. Talk to whoever prepares your accounts before switching it on.

After you turn it on

New orders pick it up within about twenty minutes. TruSync re-reads your QuickBooks currency settings periodically rather than on every order, so orders arriving in that window are still held, and are not lost. Re-sending a held order doesn’t wait for that: when you ask Trudy to re-sync one, TruSync checks your QuickBooks currency settings again first, so you can turn Multicurrency on and have the held orders re-sent straight away.

The orders that were already held do not post by themselves. Turning on Multicurrency changes what QuickBooks will accept from that moment; it does not go back and retry the orders TruSync set aside while it wouldn’t.

To get them posted, press Re-send on the exception in Order Exceptions. That tries the order again; it isn’t the Retry button the other exceptions have, because nothing is wrong with the order and there’s nothing to map. If you have a lot of them, ask Trudy to re-sync them — she can re-send all of them at once rather than one at a time. You can also contact support from your dashboard with the order numbers and we’ll re-send them for you.

New orders in that currency post normally from the moment Multicurrency is on. It is only the backlog that needs a nudge.

A refund or a cancellation is written in the same currency and at the same exchange rate as the sale it reverses, not at today’s rate.

That is deliberate. Cancelling a sale isn’t a currency trade — you didn’t hold the money and you didn’t gain or lose on the rate — so reversing it at a different rate would book an exchange gain that never happened. Using the original rate makes the sale and its reversal cancel out to exactly zero, which is what your accountant expects to see.

A QuickBooks customer is tied to a single currency when it’s created, and QuickBooks does not allow that to be changed afterwards. A CAD sale cannot be recorded against a USD customer.

So on a company with Multicurrency on, TruSync creates one customer per currency rather than one per marketplace, and puts the currency in the name — for example Web Sales Customer (CAD) alongside your existing Web Sales Customer. You will see one extra customer appear the first time you sell in a new currency. That is expected, and it is what lets the sale post at all.

If a customer with that name already exists in a different currency, TruSync does not use it and does not post the order. For example, you may already have a customer called Web Sales Customer (CAD) that was created in USD. QuickBooks would accept a CAD sale against it and record the amount as USD, so TruSync holds the order instead. It shows in Order Exceptions or the order’s sync history as an error that names the customer and both currencies, and nothing is written to QuickBooks.

To clear it, rename the existing customer in QuickBooks, then retry the order. TruSync then creates a new customer in the right currency under the name it needs. TruSync does not pick a different name for itself, because that would add a customer to your QuickBooks that you didn’t ask for.

The opposite problem: the customer you chose for your store is in a foreign currency. The customer TruSync posts your home-currency orders under is the one chosen for your store. If that customer was created in another currency, for example a customer set up in CAD on a company whose home currency is USD, TruSync does not post the order. QuickBooks would accept it and record the USD amount as CAD, so TruSync holds the order instead. It shows in the order’s sync history as an error that names the customer and both currencies, and nothing is written to QuickBooks.

To clear it, choose a customer that was created in your home currency for the store, then retry the order. You cannot change a customer’s currency in QuickBooks, so the fix is a different customer, not an edit to this one.

If you want to see sales broken out by marketplace or region rather than by currency, use a QuickBooks Class or Location instead. That is a reporting tag, it works across currencies, and you can ask Trudy to create one for you.

Payouts are different from orders. TruSync currently posts a payout only in your QuickBooks home currency, whether Multicurrency is on or off, so turning Multicurrency on does not make a foreign-currency payout post, and you should not turn it on for that reason. The payout stays visible in your payouts list, unposted, and nothing is sent to QuickBooks. See Bank Deposits & payouts.

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