A currency conversion should leave a trail you can check

In Kinshasa, holding two currencies is not exotic. Prices are quoted in dollars, change comes in francs, and everybody is doing arithmetic in their head all day.

What is harder is finding out, afterwards, what the arithmetic cost you.

The single-line problem

On most statements, a conversion is one line. Money went in as one currency and came out as another, and the only thing recorded is the result.

The rate is gone. The reference is gone. Six weeks later, when you are trying to work out whether your supplier payments are eating your margin, the statement cannot tell you — because the information was never written down.

Two legs, one quote

A conversion here posts as two linked legs: a sale in the currency you are leaving and a purchase in the currency you are entering, tied together by the quote that priced them.

That keeps both currencies’ books correct — which is the technical reason — but it also keeps the rate attached to the movement, which is the reason that matters to you.

The margin goes into the ledger

The quote carries the rate, the mid rate it was built from, and the margin between them in basis points. When the conversion posts, the margin goes with it.

This sounds like bookkeeping pedantry. It is the difference between these two sentences:

• "I think we are losing something on conversions."
• "We converted 48,000 dollars last quarter at an average margin of 61 basis points, which cost 293 dollars."

Only one of those lets you do anything about it.

Rates you can reproduce

Rates come from versioned provider snapshots. The rate in force at a given moment can be produced again afterwards, rather than being a number that existed once and then changed.

If you need to explain a conversion to an auditor, a partner or a business partner who thinks they were short-changed, the answer exists.

Quotes expire

A quote has an expiry and is honoured within it. An expired quote is re-quoted, not applied at whatever the rate has since become. You are never converted at a price you did not see.

What it costs

The margin on the quote, in basis points, before you approve. No separate fee buried inside the rate.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• A conversion is two postings linked by one quote, never a single line with a new number in it.
• The margin travels into the ledger with the posting, so the cost of conversions is a figure that can be summed rather than an impression.
• Rates come from versioned provider snapshots, so the rate used at a moment can be produced again afterwards.
• A quote has an expiry, and an expired quote is re-quoted rather than applied.

What it costs

The margin, in basis points, shown on the quote before you approve it. There is no separate conversion fee hidden inside the rate.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: Currency exchange on the features page.

Read next

• Remittance — The number on the screen is the number they get.
• The ledger — Books that cannot be quietly edited.
• Settlement and statements — Know what was taken, not just what arrived.