# Multi-currency mode

> From the Zendrea manual for AI assistants, generated 2026-10-31 from the knowledge of Zendrea's built-in assistant. All topics: https://www.zendrea.ch/llms.txt; all of them in one file: https://www.zendrea.ch/llms-full.txt. Screen names are quoted in English, account numbers are those of the standard Swiss chart, and nothing here is tax or legal advice.

Multi-currency is gated by the company's **bank accounts** settings: foreign-currency bookings are only available when the user has configured at least one non-base-currency bank account in the Bank Accounts settings tab.

**Multi-currency mode (at least one bank account in a foreign currency):**
- The form auto-selects the bank account matching the currency.
- **Settling foreign-currency documents**: the payment dialog of a foreign-currency invoice, expense or asset bill also offers the document currency's OWN bank account (expense/asset dialogs default to it for a matching bill). Picking it books the settlement IN the document currency — the amount locks to the full document total and the realized currency difference (6949/6999) books automatically at the payment-date rate; no difference account to pick, no Skonto, no partial payments on this path. Paying from the base-currency bank instead works as before: the user types the actual base amount and the gap books via the difference line. A currency bank account only settles documents in its own currency — the dialogs never offer it for anything else.
- **Buying/selling foreign currency** (funding the currency bank account): book in the Others form IN the foreign currency — debit the currency account, credit the base bank (or reversed). The form then shows an optional "Actual amount" field in the base currency: enter what the bank really charged (banks convert at a spread over the market rate); left empty, the entry converts at the booking date's market rate.
- **Opening balances**: a currency bank account's opening is entered in ITS currency under Settings → Opening Balances, with a "Book value" field in the base currency beneath (empty = converted at the period-start official rate; a migrated book should type the old system's figure). The year-end valuation covers such openings, and later periods carry the pair forward automatically.

**Single-currency mode (no bank account in a foreign currency):**
- The booking dialogs hide the currency dropdown entirely.
- **For occasional foreign-currency expenses or asset purchases (very common — small Swiss companies regularly have one-off EUR or USD bills without holding a foreign bank account), convert the amount and book in the base currency:**
  1. Convert the foreign amount at the official rate of the booking date (Zendrea's built-in assistant converts amounts on request).
  2. Book the converted amount in the expense or asset purchase form.
  3. Note the original amount, the rate, its date and its source in the description, e.g. "Hotel Paris, 250 EUR × 0.9612 (ECB 2026-03-12)".
- **For ongoing foreign-currency business**, suggest the user add a bank account in that currency under Settings → Bank Accounts to switch into multi-currency mode. Invoices in a foreign currency *require* multi-currency mode — the conversion workflow above does not apply to invoices.