Multi-currency arrives at FreshBooks
We’re pleased to announce that you can now bill customers and collect payment using multiple currencies inside FreshBooks. At first glance, the changes are small and subtle, but they have far-reaching effects throughout your account. Let me take you over most of them:
Foreign currency invoicing
Now, when you create a new invoice (or estimate, or recurring invoice), you’ll be prompted to choose a currency for that invoice. Doesn’t get much simpler than this. The appropriate currency symbol and number formatting will appear dynamically, and carry over to your template.
Helpful exchange rates
Most of your FreshBooks account will continue to work in your base currency. For example, if you’re a USD company, your re-usable items and project rates will continue to be stored in USD. When you put these on a foreign currency invoice, however, a helpful exchange rate widget will let you dynamically mark up (or down) your invoice according to the latest exchange rate data.
Multi-currency reporting
Starting now, reports will group values and totals according to the currency in which they take place. There’s a few exceptions, most notably the Profit and Loss report, which will report figures solely in your base currency by averaging exchange rate data over the queried period.
Bonus! Account statement redesign
Even if you don’t plan to make use of our new multi-currency features, there’s still good news: we’ve jazzed up our account statement to look more like our sharp new invoice template. And for the first time, printed account statements will fit in double-windowed envelopes, perfect for snail mailing to your clients.
Multi-currency FAQ
This is one of the largest releases we’ve ever had the privilege of delivering, and we’re sure you’ve got questions. So, we’ve put together a new multi-currency FAQ to help explain how it all fits together. Of course you’re always welcome to e-mail us or post a message on our forums with inquiries.
So, that about does it. We hope you’ll find this latest set of features both useful and enjoyable. And as always, feedback is both encouraged and greatly appreciated!
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12:21 pm
Have been waiting for this for so long! Thank you thank you thank you!
12:22 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Phil Schalm, Kevin Hansen. Kevin Hansen said: RT @freshbooks: [Drum roll please!] Ladies & gentlemen, FreshBooks is are pleased to announce multi-currency support! http://bit.ly/5luP7J [...]
12:31 pm
Beautiful, just beautiful. Started using Freshbooks recently and the lack of multicurrency support was my only complaint – now I cannot be any happier with Freshbooks! Way to go guys, I love using your product!
1:39 pm
Fantastic! Being a Canadian company that uses American products makes invoicing that much easier now! I LOVE YOU GUYS SO MUCH!!!
1:45 pm
Thank you!! This is so helpful!!
2:15 pm
Multi-currency invoicing is good. Any changes regarding multi-currency expenses? Entering travel expenses is a significant pain point.
2:17 pm
Louis-Philippe: Right now expenses are entered in your base currency. I’m not sure what our plans are for this, other than we plan to continue improving our multi-currency support throughout the application.
2:50 pm
Thank you!!!
3:18 pm
congrats – much needed and much appreciated!
3:18 pm
I have been waiting for this feature for quite some time, now I don’t need two separate accounts for my CDN and US clients!
Thank-you!
3:56 pm
You guys Rock!!! I was sure this would take much longer! Long Live Freshbooks!
Btw: Awesome interview here http://mixergy.com/freshbooks-mike-mcderment/ Mike!!
Cheers,
jw
4:02 pm
@Jan – thanks
@Louis-Phillippe – for the time being we are expecting you to convert your expenses to base currency when you enter them…ie there are no plans to do multi-currency expenses. So, when you enter your expense, convert it and all will be well. I hope that helps.
@all – glad you liked the upgrade. Our team worked incredibly hard on it and were enormously dedicated to it. Since we are an billing app, this touched many parts of our code base. I’m really pleased with the work and glad to see you are too!
4:27 pm
Very exciting news! Thanks for the multi-currency support! I’m very excited about this — it may solve a number of challenges we’ve had lately with the wonderful integrations that Freshbooks offers… now we can just use one main account for all our currencies.
If for some reason the new multi-currency features don’t yet fit our needs — can we continue using the existing multiple account setup? And when we’re ready to merge, can the Freshbooks team help merge previous data?
Another very important question which we’ve been working on is… will the Multicurrency support allow me to work with Xero an import the invoices from Freshbooks to Xero?
This is a great start to the new year!
4:52 pm
Thanks guys! This is a great addition. Previously I had to use different profiles to accomplish this which was really annoying…
5:17 pm
This totally totally rocks. Thanks so much – this was absolutely at the top of my wish list.
5:31 pm
The multi-currency feature was the only thing that lacked in Freshbooks, which was one reason I had to open up two accounts. The fact that this has been addressed is a huge relief.
6:03 pm
@nathan – you’re welcome to keep two accounts – all good there.
6:51 pm
This is a wonderful feature. We just signed up and that was our issue. My question is this. Now that I can have both CAD and USD do I also have the ability to add a seperate CAD and USD bank account to put these funds into for a gateway like PSIGATE?
7:47 pm
Boo yeah ! Have been waiting for this feature for quite some time, glad to see the very smooth implementation.
8:19 pm
kewl!
11:28 pm
Finally… congrats!
For real-time forex rates it would be helpfull to get real-time data. oanda.com (me no affiliate but happy user!) is a good source for this and I think they provide some sort of feeding services for other websites.
Maybe you guys have a chat, and let freshbook dive even deeper into the third millenium….
Anyway, I like your services, happy that i found you!
11:35 pm
[...] Congratulations to FreshBooks – this morning they released multi-currency support – here’s their blog announcement. [...]
1:05 am
Awesome!!! So happy today…
1:25 am
@Nathan, we need to do some work on the Xero side before the import of multi-currency invoices from FreshBooks is seamless, so for now nothing changes. I’ve updated the Xero Integration topic on the FreshBooks forum.
10:00 am
Does this then support 2 different psigate stores, one in each currency? Because I believe psigate requires different currencies in different stores.
10:17 am
Finaly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10:19 am
Thanks for adding this feature.
10:27 am
May the internet gods bless you and protect you from daemons! Oh praise be!
Now all I’ve got to do it try and re-integrate all my single currency accounts into one..!
Still, as you might have guessed – really quite pleased to see this feature after so many requests and prods.
PS – Please can you give us an update on the impact of this with the available payment portals.
10:32 am
I can’t even begin to tell you how happy this makes me. When I visit Toronto next, I will bring you a gift, I promise!
10:41 am
WOOHOO!!!
Thank you, Thank you!
10:45 am
Brian, Derek: Right now you can only use PayPal with “non-base currency” invoices. There’s more on this in our FAQ. I’m optimistic we can open this up to other gateways in the future though.
Chris: We’re using daily rates from the Bank of Canada, but we could explore using real-time commercial services (like Ouanda or XE) if we find there’s enough requests for it.
10:46 am
[...] Multi-currency arrives at FreshBooks [...]
10:48 am
Just heard the news…YAAAAAAY!
10:57 am
I was excited to see the multi currency, but ended up with Disappointment, We need OMR Currency. We are based in Oman.
The business does exist in this part of the world also.
Do Some thing
10:57 am
What about French invoices? It should be really easy for a Canadian company… It’s the only reason why I don’t use Freshbooks!
10:59 am
This is a very welcome add on – thank you!
11:00 am
And now multilingual invoices, pls
11:41 am
Useful feature. Do not see any report or other means to track gain/loss due to exchange rate fluctuations. Am I missing something?
11:49 am
Great news! Now I can consolidate my little used 2nd account for USD billings.
If I could ask for one slight tweak though, it would be to set the client’s default billing currency. Essentially, we have that now by having separate US and CAN Freshbooks accounts.
Thank you so much.
11:54 am
Great!
I think I may kill off that 2nd GBP account I was running and ask you to move the stamps over!
Question: Can I easily search for all “EU” addressed invoices? That would be a great feature. For tax reasons.
If it is not I would suggest introducing a tax zone invoice grouping function.
11:56 am
How does this affect our invoicing history? Can I go back and update all my invoices … not just new ones going forward?
11:58 am
I’m with Pascal on the language of invoices – there’s not much text on the invoice template, and should be very quick to make a wide selection of languages available (I’ll provide you with a Norwegian translation!)
12:01 pm
High 5!
Thanks SO much FreshBooks, you’re the best.
12:24 pm
LOVE IT!!
12:48 pm
I have been waiting for this for ages.
Thank you FreshBooks for finally answering my prayers. Now i don’t just like FreshBooks I LOVE it!
12:49 pm
YAYYYY
12:54 pm
Way to go!
1:14 pm
Rahul: OMR is a valid currency code choice inside the app. Perhaps you missed it accidentally?
Avatar: Nope, there’s no report for this. Our first go at multi-currency is centred around billing, but we could add more reports of this sort in the future.
Jules: Yep. We’ve added currency searches throughout the application.
1:15 pm
I’m 100% with Pål and Pascal on adding languages, this would be the perfect compliment to multi currency support! Great job guys
1:38 pm
I don’t have a use for the multi-currency functions, but love that you have them.
But I REALLY love the new account statements. One question: will we be able to download a PDF of it? Currently ‘Quick Print’ is the only option, which, while usable, is not as pretty or convenient…
Awesome job, awesome app.
2:35 pm
Impressive. Just keeps getting better.
6:00 pm
Andy: Not yet. Getting perfect PDF exports of our pages has been something of a hassle, so not sure when this will happen. I’ll bring it up with the team though.
6:50 pm
Thank you ! Makes things so much easier now for our overseas customers.
7:35 pm
As usual, FreshBooks totally ROCKS! Thank you!!!
7:37 pm
Fantastic news. Thanks !!! FreshBooks is now as good as it gets.
8:21 pm
Wow I was literally a couple of hours away from creating a whole new account to handle a second currency – I’d read this was on the way but i’d also read it was “imminent” for like a year, so thanks for the great timing and thanks for the great service
9:37 pm
[...] when I logged in on our account to prepare a new invoice, I just started to love it even more. They are now supporting multi-currency! It was only 5:17 AM and the Freshbooks gang just did my [...]
10:34 pm
Wow, great news. Will have to update my article about Freshbooks as this was my only real gripe.
Great work!
10:52 pm
Seems like the Freshbook dinner in Chicago paid off.
Thank you Mike for listening and solving my issue.
4:38 am
This is fantastic news. Freshbooks now makes it so much easier for overseas customers. Brilliant!
4:27 am
You kids rock.
5:35 am
[...] has done a nice job of multicurrency also, their rates are populated from the Bank of Canada but their approach isn’t dynamic, rather [...]
2:34 am
This is feature is really great. I was using another software for muticurrency invoices. Now I am saving some bucks and as well as all in under freshbook. thanks Keep it up!
4:11 pm
I’m still waiting a way to change the invoice form to a different language…It’s being a long time tha I want to use freshbooks, but I can’t send an Invoice in english if my client speaks Portuguese….I’ll be waiting for a change…
6:26 am
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11:52 am
who is proving the exchange rates?