Heads up! This is a guide for admins. If you're not an admin yet, ask your Beacon admin to promote you so you can start managing fields.
If you're receiving payments from or applying for grants in multiple countries, there's a good chance you're working with more than 1 currency. In a world where exchange rates are constantly changing - this can get confusing, and fast!
In Beacon, you can store money in any currency that you like:
Every account has one primary currency. You can enable as many secondary currencies as you like.
link Enabling secondary currencies
To save amounts in currencies different than your account's primary currency, first you need to enable secondary currencies:
Visit the Charity Preferences page.
Click the secondary currencies dropdown:
- Choose the currencies that you'd like to enable:
- That's it! You can now save currency fields in any of your secondary currencies, as well as your primary currency.
link Filtering records in multiple currencies
When filtering records in Beacon, it's possible to filter based on currency fields.
For example, if your primary currency is British Pound (£), you can view all payments over £10 with this filter:
Secondary currency values are handled automatically. Beacon stores a "primary currency value" for values stored in other currencies, based on real-time exchange rates.
This means that a donation of $20 would also appear in your filtered payments. (The £ equivalent is £14.78, at the time of writing)
link Reporting in multiple currencies
When creating charts in multiple currencies, Beacon shows currency values in your account's primary currency:
Values in other currencies are also stored in your account's primary currency, based on real-time exchange rates. This enables Beacon to report accurately on payments.
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Other considerations when working with multiple currencies
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Forms
If you have multiple currencies enabled, Beacon lets you take single and recurring donations in any of them.
When you create a form, the currency will default to your account's primary currency. In the form settings, you can change this to any other currency you like:
link Roll up fields
Rollup fields enable you to summarise data that happened in related records in the "parent" record. For example, the total amount a person has paid you from all their payments.
Rollup fields do not support rollups in multiple currencies. For your rollup value to appear correctly, all currency values "rolled up" should be in the same currency.
link Smart fields
Smart fields with currency fields let you create formulas based on other data stored in a record. For example, the total amount that someone still owes you.
Similar to rollup fields, currency smart fields do not support multiple currencies. All values stored on a record must be the same currency for smart fields to calculate correctly.
link Conversion rates
When any currency value is stored, the value in your account's primary currency is also saved behind the scenes. This is based on real-time (daily) exchange rates provided by OpenExchangeRates - using the record's payment date (if the record is a payment), and created date for all other records as the date to determine the correct rates.
This is more than sufficient for most CRM needs - but it might not be for your finance/accounts team. Feel free to reach out to us if you'd like to discuss this in more detail.