Clear Books

Clear Books

Clear Books is a UK specific accounting application – and a very tidy one too.

I tested its (beta) multi-currency functionality recently and it looked very promising to start with – however, I soon came a cropper (above).

Clear Books allows you to enable multi-currency from the settings tab – and after that you can create foreign currency bank accounts and invoice clients in various currencies – so far so good.

However, the system really operates in Sterling in the background. When you create an invoice in a foreign currency – in this case I generated one for €400 – the system pulls a daily exchange rate from the European Central Bank and internally stores this invoice as its Sterling equivalent – in this case GBP 349.62.

When the client pays the invoice of €400, Clear Books wants you to enter its Sterling equivalent, not the actual Euro amount which the client paid.

I can see that getting pretty messy – especially when exchange rates fluctuate between issuing the invoice and receiving payment for it.

I understand that the application needs to assign some base currency value to the foreign currency invoice, but the way Xero handles things seems to make more sense to me.

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