Hi. We are lawyers in UK and we invoice UK customer in British pounds, EU customer in Euros and US customer in dollars. Billings is a easy&great software but we can not use it because it allows only one currency. Am I wrong?

I'm sure the Marketcircle guys will chime in here, but as far as I can tell, the currency that is defined in the International control panel of System Preferences determines what the currency is that can be billed to, and there is no built-in conversion to any other currency.

That said, you could still use Billings by implementing a workaround, although it requires some work.

Let's say that your native currency was British Pounds. You could create custom "Euro" and "US" versions of your invoices that display their amounts with the proper currency *symbol* for the country of the entity that's being billed. Internally, everything would be tracked in Pounds, but you could perform the currency calculations yourself and assign either a static cost or define an adjusted rate/hr so that the total comes out correct.

For example, suppose that the current conversion rate of USD to GBP was 0.5024 (as it was when I wrote this). If you were doing a flat billing slip, and you would normally charge 500 GBP for the slip, you'd do the calculations to come up with a 995 USD charge. So you'd enter it as 995 and it would display in Billings as 995 GBP, but when you billed it out on a custom USD invoice, it would display the dollar symbol next to the slips, so it would display as 995 USD on the invoice. Same kind of approach for timed slips.

It's a pain to do it this way, and you are kind of seeing false readings while inside Billings (although if I were to do this, I'd probably make the name of the project include the currency, like "ABC Ltd. (USD)"), but it would work until Marketcircle can get full currency support into Billings.

Ken

Thanks very much Ken. I can try BUT I don't understand how to delete the pound £ in the custom invoice.

When I click the "Send Invoice" button the invoice show the £ symbol. I tried Design > New Invoice and I watched the video tutorials too. No way of deleting the pound symbol and the US customer will be confused (USD$ £ 95???).

I am using Daylite. Solving that problem at Billing will be great. I will appreciate if you can tell me what to do.

And happy new year by the way

quote:

Originally posted by Tip:
Thanks very much Ken. I can try BUT I don't understand how to delete the pound £ in the custom invoice.

When I click the "Send Invoice" button the invoice show the £ symbol. I tried Design > New Invoice and I watched the video tutorials too. No way of deleting the pound symbol and the US customer will be confused (USD$ £ 95???).

I am using Daylite. Solving that problem at Billing will be great. I will appreciate if you can tell me what to do.

And happy new year by the way

Happy New Year to you, too!

Here's what you do (for the purposes of this example, I'm assuming you're using a variation of the "Harmony" invoice template, and I'm assuming your system pref currency is GBP (£) and we're making a version of the Harmony invoice template that shows Euros (€)):

1) Open Billings, and choose "New Invoice..." from the "Design" menu.

2) When the dialog opens, leave the popup menu at the top saying "Invoices", and provide a name that you'd like to apply to the new invoice template. Note that this is the name that will be represented in Billings when you go to print an invoice, NOT the name of the template file itself (you'll provide that later). Click "Next".

3) On the next screen, click the radio button that says "Use an existing layout or report as a starting point". When the list of layouts is displayed, click on "Harmony", and then click "Next".

4) Confirm the paper size on the final screen and click "Next". You should be displaying the layout editor.

5) In the layout there are six tokens that need to be changed (those are the chunks of text highlighted in blue): Invoice Total, Rate/Price, Slip Subtotal, Invoice Subtotal, Tax Amount, and Invoice Total. I'll show you how to do one; the rest are identical:

5.1) Double-click on the cell that has the "Invoice Total" token. This will bring up the "Edit Dynamic Text" window.

5.2) Click on the "Invoice Total" token. In the lower-right corner of the sheet is a popup menu called "Formatter:". It probably shows "Currency (0.00)" as the format.

5.3) Choose "Custom Number" from that popup menu. This will display a field below it called "Format:".

5.4) Enter the currency symbol you want to use, followed by "0.00". In my template I put an extra space between the symbol and the numbers, so it looked like this: "€ 0.00". Click "OK" to return to the layout.

6) Perform this same change for all six fields I mentioned in Step 5.

7) Save your template - here's where you give it a file name which can be different than the internal name of the template if you like.

8) Close the layout editor.

Now you have a custom Euro-displaying template that you can use when you send invoices - just select that template in the popup menu at the top of the dialog box you see when you click "Send Invoice" in the main Billings window, click the Preview tab to make sure everything looks right, and then away you go!

I've posted a copy of the modified template here:

http://www.sonsothunder.com/community/billings/SampleEuroTemplate.zip

This goes into the Billings Templates folder, located at:

/Users/<userName>/Library/Application Support/Billings/Templates

Note that you might think that it should go into the "Invoices" subfolder of the Templates folder, but it doesn't work if it goes there (and I still don't understand why those folders are there since they are all empty on my Mac)...

Anyway, hope this helps,

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software, Inc.

It is working
Thanks!!!!!!!!!!

One of the struggles we have with multi-currency stuff is conversion and keeping track of all of that without complicating things.

One idea is to do the currency conversion on the template only and not in the app.

So when you run the invoice, we ask you for the rate or we get it from the web and make the calculations. We then display the converted amount on the invoice only.

This could be done today (using NSHTTPRequest) with a highly scripted invoice, but how would you account for the currently fluctuation between the time you invoice and the time you got paid?

Thx. as well for this template which saved me the hassle of changing the system preferences each time.

One strange behaviour I noted however is following : I needed the ability to make a us$ invoice instead of a standard € one .

Now when I go through all the steps you explained and change the format into "$ 0.00" , the new $ sign gets substituted nevertheless by the system preferences € . I have to change the "$" by "USD" to get it working

Ah, I didn't realize that, as I'm in the US and by default have my currency symbol set to "$". Thanks for letting me know!

quote:

This could be done today (using NSHTTPRequest) with a highly scripted invoice, but how would you account for the currently fluctuation between the time you invoice and the time you got paid?

Well, I can't speak for anyone else, and since I live in the US maybe I'm speaking out of turn, but I had just assumed that when you submit an invoice to a client, whatever the conversion rate at the time of the invoicing would be what they paid. That is, if I was in the UK with a 1.90 currency conversion rate at the time of my invoicing, and knowing I had a US client, I did the conversion and billed them for $2000, I wouldn't expect to get more than $2000 USD from them regardless of the conversion rate at the time of payment.

If this is more of the 'rule' than the 'exception', this could be put into Billings I'd think (either get the current exchange rate from the web at the time of invoicing, or use a manually entered conversion rate).

I'd dearly love Billings to support multiple currencies in some form, as I have both US and European clients.

The problem is that there is no "right" exchange rate that Billings can automatically use. Until that wire transfer of €X hits my bank account as $Y, there's no way to know what the exact rate will be. You can pull the current rates from some website, but those will be different by the time the client pays. And chances are your bank will use a slightly different rate than what the "actual" market rate is when the exchange is made. So even if you could get the rate from a site like xe.com at the instant the currency is exchanged, it still wouldn't be right.

That really only leaves one option: track it in the local currency up until you process the payment, and then record the actual amount received.

I forecast and track outstanding balances that way, and throw in an estimate of the exchange rate when I want to see the big picture. But unfortunately there just isn't an easy way to know exactly how much in USD that invoice will translate to.

What I'd like from Billings first and foremost is the ability to enter different currencies in the first place. For the more aggregated views it can fetch a rate from the web and just indicate with an asterisk that the amount is really an estimate based on the current exchange rate. Then when I receive payment, I could enter the actual amount so that when I run historical reports I get the actual amounts.

First of all, I would so love Billings to be able to handle multiple currencies!!

I am billing clients in Euros and US Dollars and do not quite understand why there would be a need of converting my home currency (€) into USD before I actually get paid. I have an hourly rate in USD for my US based clients and an hourly rate in € for my German based clients. My US rate is NOT being converted from a fixed € rate.

So what I would need is just an option to choose a currency when adding a project (or even client based). Really for me it is just a matter of substituting the € by the $ symbol on a project or client basis.

I totally agree with Dane Jensen that is is first and foremost important to be able to choose a currency. For me it is not too important that the foreign currency will be converted to my home currency in Billings, since I am not doing my tax computation with it. I just need to be able to pull up invoices and see the total amount in whatever currency I have invoiced the client. The actual amount in Euros is in my bank statement and is only relevant for my tax return.

I would totally be glad if Billings would just be natively (not with any scripting) able to create invoices in different currencies (without any conversion to home currencies for now).

I need exactly the same thing as Frank Michel

Love your software marketcircle, but please implement this feature

Marketcircle Team: Any news on this?

Check out Fanurio. That's exactly what everybody needs here currency-functionality wise: http://www.fanuriotimetracking.com/

Can anyone explain what is meant by "using NSHTTPRequest"?

The use of multiple currencies is important in today's environment. I think being able to keep the currency within the system as one value and changing in the invoice is acceptable. You would want to identify the exchange rate when creating the invoice (i.e., be able to select a currency type and exchange rate), when payment is received, incoming, you would want to see what the actual exchange rate was and any fees applied by the banks.

A question I have is how you would, within the invoice template, define the exchange rates so they are applied across each of the elements. Is there any literature on this?

Thanks,
Neil

I agree with all the previous posters who aren't concerned with the issue of conversions within billings.

I work for companies in various countries and agree fees and invoice them in their respective currencies. MY immediate need is to be able to produce invoices in several different currencies easily within the programme without resetting the computer's system preferences or complicated work rounds in templates. I'll handle the conversions and payments myself as necessary. Billings is for time tracking and invoicing for me, not recording final earnings, as I have accounts in various currencies in various countries.

I switched to billings from ibiz due to the ease of producing invoices and the quality of their final appearance. I admit to not doing sufficient homework as I didn't realise until later that Billings couldn't handle multi-currency invoicing - as ibiz does with ease.

I find Billings great in all other aspects, but if this isn't fixed soon I may be looking around again for different billing software that does support multiple currencies.