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The Challenges of Multi-Currency Accounting
For many SMEs, multi-currency accounting is one of the biggest administrative challenges. Cloud accounting services aim to make that easier.
We live in a world where it is as natural to purchase services or products from a company on another continent as it is to walk to a shop on the local high street. This is a positive thing for small-business owners who can capitalise on the opportunity to reach a wider audience, but it also poses its own challenges. Firstly, not all basic accounting products support multi-currency accounting; and secondly, fluctuating exchange rates can have a massive impact on your bottom line.
The recent surge in the popularity of cloud accounting packages is something that SMEs should be grateful for, because those packages offer an affordable and easy accounting workflow, including multi-currency support. Services such as Xero, Wave and Zoho make ideal starting points for multi-currency accounting, and are typically easier to learn to use, and more affordable, than their desktop counterparts.
Many business owners are wary of using cloud services, especially after the high-profile security breaches of Adobe and Evernote, but the services that were breached in those instances were not designed to hold private financial data. The nature of cloud accounting services means that they are developed from the ground up to be much more secure, and that your data is as safe on their servers as it would be if it were stored on your own site.
Dealing in multiple currencies is not without risk. If you need to send large amounts of money abroad, or receive a lot of payments in foreign currencies, speak to a qualified foreign currency broker for advice about the best way to protect yourself from the natural fluctuations in foreign currency values.