Sage multi-currency and QuickBooks: what to expect
Why a multi-currency Sage file converts to QuickBooks as journal entries, and what that means for your reports.
If your Sage file has multi-currency turned on, your conversion to QuickBooks works a little differently – and it’s worth understanding before you start so the result isn’t a surprise.
Why it’s different
Sage and QuickBooks both support foreign currency, but they record exchange gains, losses, and revaluations in incompatible ways. There’s no clean one-to-one mapping of every foreign-currency transaction from one system to the other. Forcing it would put your balances and your realized/unrealized FX out of step.
What we do instead
To keep the financial statements correct, a multi-currency file is converted into QuickBooks as journal entries. Every dollar (and every foreign-currency amount, translated) lands in the right account on the right date, so your Trial Balance, P&L, and Balance Sheet tie out – the detail just arrives as journal-entry lines rather than as native multi-currency invoices and bills.
What that means day to day
- Your historical numbers are accurate and your reports reconcile.
- Going forward, you set up and run multi-currency natively in QuickBooks for new transactions.
- If you only have a handful of foreign-currency transactions, we’ll talk through whether multi-currency even needs to be enabled on the QuickBooks side.
Canadian files, take note
This comes up most often on Sage 50 Canadian (Simply Accounting) files, where enabling multi-currency affects how the whole file converts. We flag it during the free evaluation so you know exactly how your file will come across before any work starts. Questions? Get in touch.