As your business expands into international markets—or simply does business across borders—multi-currency requirements naturally increase. What starts as a few foreign transactions can quickly evolve into complex daily operational needs affecting accounts payable, revenue recognition, cash management, and financial reporting.
Finance teams face the pressure of managing fluctuating exchange rates, ensuring accurate conversions, and maintaining compliance with GAAP and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)—all while trying to keep financial data consistent.
Without automation, these challenges force teams into spreadsheets and manual conversions, creating significant risk and slowing the close process. Sage Intacct eliminates these barriers by automating key multi-currency workflows, maintaining audit-ready accuracy, and scaling with growing global complexity.
The Risks of Manual Multi-Currency Accounting
Multi-currency accounting involves far more than assigning a single exchange rate to a transaction. As transaction volume increases, manual processes typically break down due to:
- Rate Timing Mismatches: Invoice, payment, and reporting dates often use different exchange rates. Spreadsheets rarely track the timing differences reliably, leading to settlement discrepancies.
- Unreliable Revaluations: Period-end revaluation requires identifying all open foreign currency balances and applying the correct rate—a time-consuming task that is highly prone to human error.
- Fragmented Data Sources: When exchange rate tables and historical rates live in different systems, reconciliation becomes difficult and inconsistent.
- Incorrect FX Gain/Loss Calculations: Even small miscalculations in realized or unrealized FX impacts can distort financial statements and mislead decision-makers.
- Audit Trail Gaps: Without system-level tracking of which rates were used—and why—auditors struggle to validate prior-period accuracy.
To address these complexities, organizations need a reliable, automated platform. This is where Sage Intacct provides significant value.
Sage Intacct: Automating the Global Finance Function
Sage Intacct provides a built-in, ASC 830 and IFRS 15-compliant multi-currency engine designed to eliminate manual processes and ensure accurate global reporting. Intacct supports automated currency conversions, real-time consolidations, and multi-entity financial management that scales with your operations across different borders.
Below are three core areas where Sage Intacct transforms international accounting and finance:
1. Automated Transaction Processing
Sage Intacct removes the guesswork from daily operations by maintaining a dual-recording model for every transaction:
- Transaction Currency Amount: The original amount entered (e.g., the vendor bill in Euros).
- Base Currency Amount: The value converted using the appropriate exchange rate.
This ensures consistent reporting, prevents rate discrepancies, and allows finance teams to track currency impacts in real time.
2. Flexible Exchange Rate Management
Organizations vary in how they source and apply exchange rates. Sage Intacct supports multiple approaches, including:
- Automated rate feeds from providers such as OANDA (supported natively by Sage Intacct)
- Configurable rate types, including spot rates, average monthly rates, and contract-specific custom rates
- Complete historical rate tracking, ensuring prior periods remain locked and auditable
This flexibility allows finance leaders to align system behavior with internal policies and global compliance requirements.
3. Streamlined Month-End Revaluation
Month-end is where many teams lose the most time. Sage Intacct automates multi-currency revaluation by:
- Identifying all open AP, AR, and GL foreign-currency balances
- Applying correct period-end exchange rates
- Automatically calculating and posting unrealized gains or losses
- Generating auto-reversing entries for the next period
This automation shortens the close cycle and ensures accurate balance-sheet valuations.
Enhanced Global Reporting and Financial Visibility
Sage Intacct supports continuous global consolidation, giving finance leaders real-time visibility into results across entities and currencies. You can produce financial statements in:
- Local entity currency
- Functional (base) currency
- Consolidated reporting currency
Dashboards dynamically convert values, enabling CFOs and executives to view performance in any currency with just a few clicks.
Best Practices for Maximizing FX Accuracy in Sage Intacct
To get the most value from Sage Intacct’s multi-currency engine, organizations should:
- Standardize rate sources (e.g., ensure all entities use OANDA or the same verified data feed)
- Clearly define rate types for spot, average, and custom contract scenarios
- Automate revaluations to avoid month-end bottlenecks and reduce human error
- Provide localized training so users select correct currencies at the point of entry
These practices ensure consistent, compliant data across the entire organization.
Partner with SWK Technologies for Global Scalability
Managing multiple currencies introduces complexity across every part of the finance function. While Sage Intacct provides the tools to automate these workflows, SWK Technologies helps organizations implement, configure, and optimize these capabilities for maximum operational impact.
As an award-winning Sage partner, SWK specializes in helping organizations optimize Sage Intacct, streamline multi-currency workflows, and gain deeper visibility into international operations. Whether you are implementing multi-currency for the first time, refining existing revaluation processes, or preparing for a new global expansion, our experts guide you through best practices and configuration decisions.
Contact SWK Technologies today to build a more accurate, compliant, and scalable multi-currency accounting operation.