How to Track Foreign Prices in QuickBooks
If you’re using the QuickBooks Multicurrency function, you may have noticed that the fluctuating exchange rate can make it very difficult to create fixed foreign prices that do not fluctuate with the exchange rate. The fact is, you need to have the right subscription level of QuickBooks Online or the right version of QuickBooks Desktop in order to enable you to create one or more fixed foreign price lists. If you don’t know what you’re doing, your foreign price will have to be curated and edited on each and every sales form, and that leads to errors, bad customer relations, and perhaps lost sales or, even worse, a net loss on each and every item you sell.
Which Version of QuickBooks is Right for Me?
Although every single Windows version of QuickBooks Desktop can turn on multicurrency, only Desktop Premier and Desktop Enterprise can be configured to maintain foreign price lists that do not fluctuate with the exchange rate. That is because Premier and Enterprise include Per Item Price Levels, and those are needed to create a foreign price for any currency for each “widget” and “service” that are sold by the company. In fact, you can create several price levels for each currency, if necessary, so that you’d have different price lists for customers of foreign country X for, let’s say, retail, wholesale, and not-for-profit customers. It requires a particular setup, but once this setup has been completed and the users trained in the workflow, you don’t have to worry about foreign prices fluctuating on you ever again. QuickBooks Online subscription levels from Essentials and up allow for Multicurrency to be enabled. But remember, allowing for foreign prices that do not fluctuate with the exchange rate requires QuickBooks Online Plus (and, in the US, QuickBooks Online Advanced). That’s because of the Price Rules feature unavailable in subscription levels below Plus. Esther Friedberg Karp can show you how to use this feature to your best advantage.
Esther Friedberg Karp can help
If you want to create foreign price lists that are fixed (until you wish to change your prices), let Esther Friedberg Karp guide you in the proper use of QuickBooks Desktop and Online and how to configure them to track everything Multicurrency. She’ll take you through the limitations of the software, as well as how to “back up” your QuickBooks Desktop or Online in case you do need to “undo” multicurrency. If you need to export items or transactions from one Multicurrency QuickBooks company to another company, Esther can help you through that as well.