If you've issued an invoice in a foreign currency, your customer should of course pay you for that!
But at the moment, you'll need to enter that receipt into FreeAgent in your business's main currency, so £ sterling for our UK users. At the moment FreeAgent can't support multi-currency banking.
So how do you enter the money in £ sterling?
If you're manually entering your bank transactions (i.e. you're not uploading them from online banking), then you'll see on your bank statement how much you've been paid in £ sterling, so make sure the "Credit Value" box on your manual payment matches the amount on your bank statement.
FreeAgent tells you underneath the box how much this would be if your customer paid you using today's exchange rate.
You'll also notice that FreeAgent has put in another value box, here.
In this box, you need to put what the equivalent value in the foreign currency was.
Full or part payment for the invoice?
So if your customer has paid you in full for the invoice, just put in the same amount in the foreign currency as you issued the invoice for. FreeAgent will fill this in automatically.
If your customer has paid you in part, then you'd need to check with your customer how much he/she was paying you in the foreign currency. Your customer would need to tell you, for example, "I'm paying you €50", and that'd be the figure you'd put in the foreign currency box.
What about any bank charges or commission deducted?
If your customer is paying you net of any charges or commission, then you'd need to split the sterling amount (we explain how to do that in our separate article here), but don't adjust the foreign currency amount. This is so that FreeAgent will mark the right amount of the invoice as paid.
What if the exchange rate has changed since I issued the invoice?
A realized currency gain or loss crystallizes on this invoice once it's fully or partly paid. For more information about this please see our separate article about multi-currency invoicing.
That's the end of this article. You've seen how to enter money received against a foreign currency invoice if you're manually entering your bank transactions.