james grant's dashboard

A comment on the discussion "Opening Balance Sheet does not balance!" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi Ed,

I know how my own NBV is calculated, but I don't know how to feed this information into FAC.

If I make an entry just before the start date for FAC I end up messing up my bank balance figure as well as incurring an additional 25% depreciation charge on the balance sheet. I just need to effect the starting NBV. Any ideas? – Mike Wilson, on October 07, 2008 15:21

A comment on the discussion "Opening Balance Sheet does not balance!" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi Ed,

I have a slightly similar issue in that I need to get the opening balance sheet to balance and the Fixed Assets section on FAC is wrong. I've entered manual figures and this does actually affect the balance on the bank account (despite a fixed starting balance being set).

I'm not sure if I'm entering these values correctly?

James, Ed - how did you get your balance sheet issue sorted in the end?

Thanks! – Mike Wilson, on October 07, 2008 15:19

salted replied on August 14, 2008 16:23 to the question "PayPal currency recognition" in FreeAgent Central:

Thanks for the followup Ed. Yes, it's the second step we would need.

I have spoken with our accountant today and for the meantime we're going to keep records for the individual PayPal transactions outside of FreeAgent. That will be fine for now, as long as we keep copies of all the invoices ourselves, and record which include/exclude VAT.

Thanks for your help.

Ed Molyneux replied on August 14, 2008 08:30 to the question "PayPal currency recognition" in FreeAgent Central:

salted,

Our current work on multi-currency is on multi-currency invoicing and being able to reconcile the differences when payments received in your native currency aren't the same as you expected because of currency movements. So far so simple ;0>

What we're not doing yet is handling bank-accounts (or indeed paypal accounts) which are in other currencies and payments which are received against invoices into those accounts. Or purchases made from those accounts. Or transfers between accounts of different currencies.

This second step is significantly more complex to generate the accounts for.

The instantaneous conversions that paypal does if you maintain a single GBP account but take payments in USD - something we already deal with - is like 'Hello World' in comparison.

We're up for it, it's just going to take a little longer.

Is it that second step you're needing, then? Could we somehow script the conversion of those Paypal transactions into GBP?

salted replied on August 13, 2008 15:45 to the question "PayPal currency recognition" in FreeAgent Central:

Is there an update on when the multiple currency support might be available? Unfortunately I don't think we will be able to use FreeAgent fully until it is, as all our income comes through PayPal, and in 3 different currencies.

Converting it automatically to GBP is not really a problem, but doesn't help for all the transactions that we've done previously (thousands of them).

I do realise this is likely a large task for you, but it would be great to get some idea of the timeframe.

Jay Armstrong started following the idea "Paypal fund transfer workaround" in FreeAgent Central.

Olly replied on June 26, 2008 11:46 to the question "PayPal currency recognition" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi Nick

1. You do this somewhere in the Paypal account settings -- I can't remember off-hand, but this article should help: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/web...

2. FreeAgent now supports currency conversions for uploaded Paypal statments provided your Paypal account is just in GBP. Here's the post about it from our blog: http://www.freeagentcentral.com/centr.... Unfortunately if have two accounts, one GBP one USD, you won't be able to take advantage of this automatically for your prior statements.

I do think there might be a workaround for you, although it's not that straightforward. If you download all your prior transactions in a CSV file from Paypal (using the 'Balance Affecting Payments' option) you could edit it (using Excel or a text editor) to manually remove all the USD-specific transactions as well the 'From US Dollars' transactions. When you import this edited file, you'll get all the GBP transactions and all the GBP balance transfers from your USD account (these will appear with the description "To British Pound"), which should result in the correct balance appearing in FreeAgent.

Does this make sense at all? Feel free to email me at olly at freeagentcentral dot com if you'd like to go through it in a bit more detail.

Nick replied on June 25, 2008 22:11 to the question "PayPal currency recognition" in FreeAgent Central:

Thanks for letting us all know, Olly. Two quick follow-up questions from this:

1) How do I we tell PayPal to convert USD amounts to GBP automatically?

2) Is there a way of adjusting the last 7 months worth of transactions in FAC to reflect that they were made in USD and not GBP?

Right now FAC is telling me I have a PayPal balance of about £1400, when it should be at 0 due to the currency difference.

Olly replied on June 25, 2008 20:51 to the question "PayPal currency recognition" in FreeAgent Central:

Hey Nick

Unfortunately we don't support multiple currencies in this way in FreeAgent right now, although it is on our radar and we'll be working on it in the coming months.

Presumably you're receiving USD payments into a USD denominated Paypal account, as opposed to the option whereby Paypal convert payments to GBP automatically?

Nick replied on June 25, 2008 14:56 to the question "PayPal currency recognition" in FreeAgent Central:

It'd be great to have this functionality -- I take payment in both USD and GBP, but FreeAgent doesn't currently let me reflect this. :(

The exported QIF files show amounts in both dollars and pounds; when imported into FA, they all become pounds. Would it be possible to map the first character of PayPal's QIF "amount" field to the currency in FreeAgent?

richallum replied on June 25, 2008 06:45 to the question "Accountant recommendation" in FreeAgent Central:

Small po9int but I'm actually using Quay - and very happy too! aswl is using SJD and seems happy too!

Olly replied on June 24, 2008 22:35 to the question "Accountant recommendation" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi all

The FreeAgent Friendly list is for accountancy partners who actively support clients using FreeAgent, and who offer deals which reflect the added value FreeAgent provides. At the present time we don't have such an arrangement with SJD, but we do have many customers (like richallum above) who are happily using SJD and FreeAgent together, so we can vouch for their quality service.

Blevins Franks replied on June 24, 2008 13:46 to the question "Accountant recommendation" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi Aswl, Sorry unable to help regarding SJD. But Im sure they are still friendly and suggest you ask them about their view of working with clients using Freeagent. As you will know we welcome clients using Freeagent and will agree the services you need so you only pay for what you need, so if you encounter any difficulties please dont hesitate to contact me.

aswl replied on June 24, 2008 12:40 to the question "Accountant recommendation" in FreeAgent Central:

Sorry I didn't look too hard about whether you were staff or not. I wonder what this means for SJD. Can anybody help?

richallum replied on June 24, 2008 12:38 to the question "Accountant recommendation" in FreeAgent Central:

I'm a user not from Freeagent so it's not 'my list'. However, SJD are not on there now but I'm sure they're still friendly!

aswl replied on June 24, 2008 12:33 to the question "Accountant recommendation" in FreeAgent Central:

http://www.sjdaccountancy.com/
I'm sure I've seen their logo on your 'friendly' list. Are they not friendly any more? (they are my accountants)

richallum replied on June 24, 2008 12:30 to the question "Accountant recommendation" in FreeAgent Central:

Hi, not sure who SJD are.

aswl replied on June 24, 2008 12:21 to the question "Accountant recommendation" in FreeAgent Central:

is SJD off your list??

Stuart Jones replied on June 13, 2008 14:52 to the question "Accountant recommendation" in FreeAgent Central:

@richallum,
Not me this time (it's the same on the Lottery!) but thanks for letting us know.

richallum replied on June 13, 2008 11:39 to the question "Accountant recommendation" in FreeAgent Central:

Thanks for all the replies. I picked one accountant from the list at random and have been very impressed - sorry of that's not you!