QuickBooks 2009 and Enterprise Solutions can print checks in currencies other than the US dollar (USD), with a few words of caution. Each time you attempt to print checks in a currency other than the USD, QuickBooks will display the warning screen shown below. To continue with the printing process, you’ll need to click Ok. There’s no obvious way to turn the warning off, so you’ll see it once each time you print checks from a foreign bank account.
Note that the warning says that QuickBooks only supports printing on “US dollar check templates and other currencies may not match” that template. You can simply order checks for your foreign bank accounts that do match the US dollar check template.
If your preprinted check for each foreign bank account matches the US check template, your checks denominated in a foreign currency will print fine. For example, the normal QuickBooks voucher check prints the check amount to the right of the payee with a pre-printed currency symbol ($ for USD) at the left margin of the check amount. For a check in a foreign currency, QuickBooks will print the 3 letter currency abbreviation before this amount; if you want a currency symbol to appear at the left margin of the check amount, you’ll have to order pre-printed checks with the symbol for the currency used by each bank account.
Checks will print using the currency for the bank account from which you make the payment, provided the currency for the bank account is either the same currency as the vendor or your home currency. If your vendor transacts in a foreign currency and you record payments from a foreign bank in that currency, your checks will print in that currency. If USD is your home currency and you issue these payments from a USD bank account, QuickBooks will record the bill payment for the amount converted to USD at the exchange rate entered when paying the bill. But you can’t pay a vendor transacting in EUR with British Pound Sterling (GBP) if your home currency is USD.
Therefore, when paying foreign bills in a foreign currency, be sure to select the correct A/P Account and bank Account on the Pay Bills window. If you don’t select the correct A/P Account, the bill won’t appear in the window; if you don’t select the correct bank Account, you’ll make your payment in your home currency.
If you inadvertently make payment from the wrong bank account, you can easily fix the error by opening the Bill Pmt – Check transaction for that payment and changing the Bank Account.
QuickBooks will prevent you from changing the Bank Account to an account denominated in a currency that doesn’t match the customer/vendor or that isn’t your home currency.
So, if you make sure your check template for your foreign bank matches the US check template and you’re paying foreign vendors in their own foreign currency from a bank account using that same currency – all easy-to-manage considerations, your foreign currency checks will print just fine.
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When will Intuit Canada realize that a data file cleanup tool is desperately required? My business creates 50-100 invoices/day with 5-50 items on each invoice. The side effect of this is that the database grows by 2-3MB/day and in 2 years time our data file is consistently 1GB in size. at that point we are forced to create a new data file and re-create 350 memorized transactions (for standing customer orders) by hand. Not pretty!
I think a convenient portal to log product big observations as well as the ability to offer suggestions that are actually read would be a huge improvement.
Look, it’s a great product but it could be so much better.
Dave, A good question, but unfortunately we don’t have the answer. We support US QuickBooks, but Intuit rarely gives the kind of future information you’re after. The cleanup tools are improved for 2012, but whether they are improved enough and whether or when those improvements will make their way to Canada would need to be addressed. Meanwhile, here are 2 suggestions: If you have an inventory-based business, consider using a 3rd party add-on for that part of your accounting. We can recommend some if you provide more info. You’d separate the transactions causing your data file to grow quickly from Intuit, but keep them integrated to QB. You can also consider QB Enterprise Solutions. Yes, it’s a big jump in price, but the database is more robust and a 1 Gb data file would not present a problem. If you have a multi-user setup, it might be worth checking out.
We are a small bakery. I beleiev our data file is growing by 2-3K/day (not MB as i erroneously wrote in my prior post) due to the number of invoices x number of items on invoices. These create records in the DB which I summize is growing the data file wildly. I don’t know how I could pull those outside of QB qith a 3rd party add-on.
Are you aware of any email address to report product bugs and suggestions for future enhancements?
Dave, you are probably underestimating the amount that your data file is growing, but you’re over-reacting to it. Intuit recommends that a QB Pro or Premier data file remain under 100 Mb in size, but many QB users comfortably operate data files that are 2 times that size and achieve reasonable performance. You also need to pay attention to the limits on list entries in QuickBooks. A file that is growing by 3K each day will increase by under 1.2 Mb per year, so at that rate, you have a lot of years before you’ll challenge the current capabilities of QuickBooks. Even at 10X that rate, you’re in good shape for a long, long time.
If you have a large data file, there are steps you can take to improve the performance of QuickBooks. As your data file grows, you can also archive older, closed transactions to reduce the size and regain lost performance. While it’s good to think about how much your data file is growing on a regular basis, look at the absolute size and level of performance.
As for third-party add ons, if your invoicing and inventory functions are performed by another program with its own data files, that data is not added to your QB company file. You end up with multiple files, but your company file is smaller and therefore faster for other functions. This is a common approach used by businesses with heavy invoicing or inventory requirements.
What sort of bugs have you observed? What sort of suggestions do you have? Have you looked on your QB help menu?