Multi-currency transfers

[Catherine]

Hi folks -- tried this on another forum and got nothing; folks mainly seemed slap-happy with the long weekend coming up (at that time).

Here's one that I'd like advice on how to handle. The way the client has done this in past years has been a convoluted, confusing morass, but weren't ready to have someone else look at it. They've now asked me to take a look and see if anything can be done to make this clearer/easier. There may simply be no good way to do it in QuickBooks, and I've found nothing in the Intuit forums that would help.

Let's see if I can explain the situation clearly.

My client sells consulting services and proprietary software to companies in the US and around the world. The company has a "sister company" (for lack of a better term; they work together but are separate entities) in the UK. To keep them separate, I'll use Company A (American) and Company B (British). Each company has its' own QB files which are -not- shared.

A sells products and services to US companies; issues invoices and gets paid. B does the same but to non-US companies. When B sells a product/service (for which they send invoices to and receive payments from their customers), they "buy" this product from A at half-price. They also "bill" A for services rendered to complete the sale and supply the product. These two transactions roughly cancel each other out in terms of magnitude. B also bills A for work done for US customers (A does almost no work for non-US customers). This would really be easier if I could put up my little chart with boxes and arrows. Sigh.

A gets no cash from sales to B. B gets no cash from A for services/products sold. There are cash transactions when services are rendered by B for A's customers - invoices are sent by B and paid by A. There are also corrections for currency fluctuations (sometimes over a year goes by before the dust settles).

All the non-US sales are tracked in Excel and eventually all is accounted for and any payments due (which can be in either direction) are made. Both A and B have then been using general journal entries, customer/vendor duos, and other awkward techniques to keep track in QB. One result for A is a long list of pseudo-"bills to pay" that show up on A/P and pseudo-"invoices due" that show up on A/R.

An additional fillip is that the folks at B don't like to do accounting so their spreadsheets are usually a couple months out of date at least. And the folks at A go nuts with the spreadsheet so they delay in trying to figure out what B has done.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can approach this? We can start with whatever other information folks need in order to make sense of it. I know my head was spinning when A was trying to explain what they were doing. And QB's awkward handling of multi-currency transactions isn't going to help matters.

Hope everyone enjoyed their long weekend.

Catherine

[kcjenkins]

First question is: Are you getting enough fees to justify the time to spend on this?

2nd : Assuming the answer to 1st is 'Yes', would B use an excel spreadsheet that A provided, if you build one for them that is more self-calculating? Because if they won't use it, there is no sense spending time building it.