Invoicing in a foreign currency

Invoicing across a border adds one field and several decisions: which currency, at what rate, converted when, and who carries the risk if it moves. The app supports sixteen currencies with the right number of decimals for each. The choices around them are commercial, and worth making deliberately rather than by default.

Choose the currency before you quote, not after

The currency you invoice in decides who carries the exchange risk. Invoice in your own and the client absorbs the movement between the quote and the payment; invoice in theirs and you do. For short payment terms and stable pairs the difference is noise; for a six-figure project on ninety-day terms it is a real number. Whichever you choose, fix it in the quote and keep it through the invoice, because switching currency midway through a job means renegotiating the price whether or not anyone says so out loud.

State the currency in letters, not just a symbol

The dollar sign belongs to several currencies, the krone to three countries, and a bare comma or point can be read as either a thousands separator or a decimal point depending on where the reader is. On a cross-border document write the ISO code — USD, EUR, TRY — next to the total. The app labels amounts with the code rather than relying on a symbol, for exactly this reason: a document that is ambiguous about its currency is a document that gets paid in the wrong one.

Currencies without a minor unit

The Japanese yen has no subunit in practice: prices are whole yen, and writing ¥1,250.00 is not merely unusual, it implies a precision that does not exist. The app stores the decimal count per currency, so choosing JPY rounds and formats to whole yen everywhere on the document, while USD or EUR round to cents. This matters most when converting a price from another currency, where a naive two-decimal conversion produces a number that cannot be paid.

Exchange rates and what to write down

If your accounts are kept in one currency and you invoice in another, the amount has to be converted for your books, and the rate that applies is usually the one on a specific date — the invoice date or the payment date — as determined by your national rules. Recording the rate and its date on or with the invoice takes seconds and saves an argument later. Do not treat a converted figure as the amount owed unless the invoice says so: if the invoice is in euros, euros are what is owed, and the local-currency figure is information, not the claim.