Henry Edwards33 said:Fair questions. Personally, I record exchange rate differences on the day the payment hits because anything else is just extra paperwork for nothing. I didn't do it that way before, and I'm not starting now—I have no intention of keeping customer accounts open indefinitely over some tiny amount of change. The same goes if they pay more due to a favorable rate. That extra cash is real revenue, and I need to report it somewhere. 🤷
I’m not even going to touch the part about you digging through IRA records; that’s a whole different rabbit hole, and honestly, it shouldn't have been a topic to begin with. You just close out the issued IRA for the full amount, and then the exchange differences are handled separately as either income or an expense 😉
Looking at your situation, you had an export, and now you've got a shipment worth, say, $167. You actually collected $166. Previously, under tax-exempt exports, you should have listed $167, while putting the differences into the KPI.
If I've missed something, please set me straight. My ego can handle the correction 😬
One more thing—don't take everything you read on this Forum as gospel. Always double-check the facts with a pro 😉
Thanks to all the great people helping out here. I've learned a lot from you guys.
Edit:
That’s spot on, though I think our real struggle is figuring out how to actually execute it in the software.
Thinking it through, here is my logic 😁
If $498 landed in your account, that’s what you have to recognize as income, and that specific amount needs to show up in your KPI. Right?
You get that figure by closing out the customer's invoice for $167 (since they paid exactly that and you aren't going to chase them for $0.67 differences) and then you plug those $0.67 into the KPI as an expense. Long story short: the customer account is cleared in full, and you’ve recognized exactly $166. You just ran it through your accounting software in a way that generated an exchange difference. It’s the same with positive differences. If you received $167, you still have to account for that extra $2.00 somehow. You close the customer account for $167, and put the $2.00 in the KPI as income because, following cash principles, you actually collected $167, not $500.00. I think I might have just confused myself 🤔
Richard Howard55 said:You think you've tangled things up, but that's just how I've always done it! 😁
Even if it is messy, it seems perfectly logical to me to reduce collections down to basic cash basis accounting.
I haven't dealt with a VAT calculation case personally (everything was export services, which are exempt from VAT). But even if I had, I’d keep doing it this way, because it isn't impossible to run the exchange difference through the IRA (+ or -) and close out the payment.
(Original invoice + exchange difference = cash basis, and the government gets its VAT).
🤔 That crossed my mind, but I have no idea how one would actually implement it... I don't have a specific account for exchange rate differences... so on what basis would I even open an IRA? The invoices sent out included VAT (for domestic transport), but there were also combinations where part of the invoice was non-taxable (where the transport route was partly domestic and partly international).
Honestly, after sleeping on it, I think I’m going back to my old ways.
Up until this year, I’ve been recording exchange rate differences through receipts. Essentially, I’d open an IRA at the daily rate, then close that IRA upon payment, and any difference between that and the actual payment date rate would be recorded as a receipt on the checking account—positive if it was a gain, negative if it was a loss.
I only started messing around with adjusting the IRA amounts to match the exact payments this year because my advisor insisted that the IRA should follow the cash basis principle. But that totally threw off my chronological order—I used to enter invoices as soon as they were issued. And man, did I get tangled up... it happened that part of an invoice was settled via compensation, while the rest was paid in USD to the checking account the following month, and suddenly my whole reconciliation system just fell apart...
Looking back at what
lili wrote about recording them as expenses (I assume in kind), I realized I was completely wrong in how I booked negative exchange differences (I was treating them as negative receipts on the checking account). I really ought to fix this in my books; wouldn't that be the better way to handle it?
Also, one more thing: if I receive a single payment covering multiple invoices, should I record the exchange rate differences as separate line items in the KPI for each individual invoice, or just bundle the total difference into one single KPI entry?
Frankly, I can't wrap my head around this advisor's claim that exchange rate differences don't exist for sole proprietorships... they definitely exist for corporations, but apparently not for small businesses according to her. 🤔 Before July 1st, I could still sort of fudge things with the IRAs and reconcile the totals, but since July 1st, I can't, because everything goes straight into the ZP, which brings me right back to the same old headache regarding exchange differences. Up until July, I only dealt with differences based on the IRA, but now I have to deal with them based on the URA too...
In my opinion, from July 1st onward, exchange rate differences become absolutely unavoidable for small businesses as well—unless the customer pays the exact amount in USD, in which case there's no gap. But as soon as they pay in a different currency, there's a discrepancy. I have all sorts of customers; some pay the exact dollar amount, but others (even from the same country!) insist they can't pay in USD because it isn't their official currency. 🙄
Nicole Lee6 said:That’s exactly how I handled things last year 🤷 but then this year they told me it doesn't fly for small business owners. Apparently, if they book using cash basis in the KPI, but they have to follow accrual when reporting income, they have to book it the way I described above. To make everything align, a small business owner would actually need to manage their IRA on a cash basis rather than an accrual basis based on issued invoices—those are just the specific details from the explanation I received 😬 so, I ended up neatly correcting the invoices upon receipt of payment to match the actual amount paid. Foreign clients don't care about the amount shown in USD; they just wanted me to note the informative amount in EUR, and all their payments were in EUR as I indicated through a note on the invoice. For myself, I just went through my records without that EUR note. I operated under the assumption that nobody was going to cross-reference the invoices in my books with those sent over to the branch in Mexico (and let me mention, this was back when invoices were still issued with sales tax, so the government was much more invested in making sure they got their cut)
Why? Because if, for example, I issued an invoice on September 1st converted to USD in the amount of $33, when I get paid on October 15th at the current daily exchange rate, it turns out I actually received $40. If I close the IRA with $33 and put $6.75 as income in the KPI, I’ve only given the government sales tax on $33, not on that extra 20.00. But I am legally required to give the government sales tax on $40 because that is my actual income from the payment, not $33.
So, what you do is you go back to that invoice, delete it, and create a new one with the same date and invoice number but a slightly different amount; say 96.00 + 24.00 = 120.00. You enter 120.00 into the payment table, and the government gets its lovely $8.00. That’s why I did it; I was practically forced down that path 🤣 and what can I say, I’m easily swayed 😂
EDIT: From what I could gather from her, the issue arises from the tax perspective of booking exchange rate differences as receipts—it essentially looks like you're shortchanging the government on their portion of the sales tax 🤔
I always assumed that for a sole proprietor, you didn't recalculate the VAT on exchange differences. I'm asking because I genuinely don't know: are corporations required to pay VAT on the gains made from positive exchange rate differences?