QuickBooks Multicurrency

What the setting actually changes

The visible change is a Currency column in the chart of accounts and a Currency field on customer, vendor and account profiles. Intuit says existing accounts are put in your home currency by default. Nothing you already recorded is touched.

The real change is in what a record can be. In a single-currency file, a customer is just a name with a balance. With Multicurrency on, Intuit says you can assign a single currency to most types of accounts, including customers, vendors, and accounts in the chart of accounts like bank and credit card accounts or accounts receivable. An invoice to a euro customer is written in euros. A deposit into a euro bank account is in euros. Each of those transactions also carries an exchange rate, which QuickBooks uses to translate it into the home currency, because reports only speak the home currency.

The exchange rate is filled in for you. Intuit says foreign currency values are updated automatically every four hours, and that you can enter your own rate on a transaction or update the rate in your currency list for the day. What QuickBooks never does is restate a foreign balance on its own when rates move. That is the job of the home currency adjustment, covered in the related entries below.

One currency per customer, vendor and account

This rule causes more confusion than the setting itself. A customer has one currency. If a customer who has always paid in US dollars pays you in Canadian dollars, QuickBooks will not let you record that payment against the US dollar customer. Intuit’s instruction for changing an assigned currency is to create a new customer or vendor and assign the new currency, and its customer article adds that once you record transactions with a customer you cannot change the currency in their profile. You make the old profile inactive, and the old transactions stay where they are.

In practice, a business that sells to the same customer in two currencies ends up with two customer records, and Intuit’s own steps suggest adding the currency to the display name to tell them apart. That is not a duplicate to merge. It is how QuickBooks keeps each currency’s receivable separate.

Accounts follow the same logic. Intuit says you need to add a new account for each currency you transact in, and that once an account has a transaction posted to it, you can no longer change its currency. So a Stripe balance held in euros needs its own euro clearing account and its own euro bank account. Re-pointing a US dollar account at euros after the fact is not an option.

The one place currencies never go is the profit and loss. Intuit states that income and expense accounts always use your home currency. A euro sale is a euro receivable and, once paid, euro cash, but the revenue line is booked in home currency at the rate on that transaction.

What to settle before you turn it on

Because the setting is permanent, the decisions that matter are made before you click it.

Confirm the plan. Simple Start and EasyStart files cannot turn it on, so a Stripe business on either plan has to upgrade or keep converting foreign amounts by hand.

Choose the home currency deliberately. It is selected in the same Currency section, and it cannot change afterwards. It should be the currency you report and pay tax in, not the currency most of your Stripe sales arrive in.

Check what stops working. Intuit says QuickBooks Bill Pay and QuickBooks Payments are not compatible with Multicurrency, that Multicurrency will not work if QuickBooks Commerce is connected, and that turning it on inactivates the cash flow planner.

Plan the accounts. Each foreign currency you will hold needs its own bank account, and for a Stripe balance, its own clearing account.

Expect journal entries to get stricter. In its Canadian help, Intuit notes that QuickBooks Online blocks journal entries that mix currencies for customers or suppliers.

If any of those is a blocker, the alternative is to stay single-currency and let Stripe convert every foreign charge into your default currency before it reaches your books. The post linked below walks through what that looks like when a foreign Stripe balance already exists.

When a Stripe business actually needs it

Charging customers in other currencies is not, on its own, a reason to turn Multicurrency on. If your Stripe account has one balance, Stripe converts foreign charges into that balance’s currency, and if that currency is your QuickBooks home currency, every amount that reaches your books is already in home currency.

The setting becomes necessary when the books need to show the foreign amount itself. The common cases are a Stripe account that holds balances in more than one currency and pays each one out to a bank account in that currency, invoices issued in a currency other than home currency that you want QuickBooks to show in the customer’s currency, and a business that wants foreign customer balances kept in the currency the customer owes.

In each of those, QuickBooks has to hold money in a currency other than home, and that is only possible with Multicurrency on. A Canadian business that adds a US dollar bank account to Stripe so it can keep US dollar sales in US dollars is the textbook example.