Currency Exchange

Owned by Thomas Timbul
Last updated: Feb 19, 2020
3 min read

This feature is designed for sellers who deal in multiple currencies, such as buying products in Euros, but selling in Dollars or vice versa. A particular business may buy in Pound Sterling, sell to the USA, but usually trade and calculate profits in Euros:

 

PC2 downloads live currency exchange rates a few times per day and will automatically and transparently bake these into all the formulas used in Excel, so that you can work with the foreign prices as supplied, but see profits in the currency that you understand on a daily basis.

In the above example, the formula generated for Net Profit might look like this:

You can see the values of 0.9249 and 1.2053 appearing - these are the exchange rates as current at the time of the run, and will take care of converting between all the currencies that may be in use on the sheet.

The column title of currency based columns will adapt depending on the currency. For example, Net Profit will be suffixed with “$ USD” when profits are shown in US Dollars.

Configuring rates

You can influence the rates to use a more realistic exchange rate by accessing the Currencies settings menu:

The following changes can be made:

Default List and Shipping fee currency

This is a convenience setting for the default “input” currency which will be pre-selected on Run Settings under 6. Costs are in, as well as when creating a new cost profile.

Operating Currency

This setting affects Net Profit and related columns. It is what will be pre-selected on Run Settings under 7. Return profits in. It can still be changed for each run.

Fixed percentage commission

This affects all currency pairs and will add a premium or discount (depending on conversion direction) of the specified percentage to all. This is useful for cases where you have a currency broker with a fixed markup on the mid-market rate.

For example, if your bank, broker, or card issuer charges a fixed 2% markup/commission/fee on all exchanges, you can specify 2% and a rate of 1.00 will turn into 0.98.

Individual commission

You can also override the fixed percentage (if any) for individual currency pairs or only apply a commission to some.

Your actual rate as it will be applied to your analysis is shown in the currency pair table, together with the most recent mid-market rate and the last update timestamp.