How to reconcile SEK & PLN settlements in Xero

There is a limitation within Xero & QuickBooks that doesn't allow you to match foreign currency invoices or bills to a 3rd foreign currency.
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SEK and PLN settlements are being converted by Amazon into EUR but then your home currency is in GBP, that's where the issue occurs.

Your EUR account can only match against entries in EUR.

Since these settlements are sent over in SEK/PLN they cannot be matched with anything other than SEK/PLN bank accounts or your home currency GBP bank accounts.

Long term, if possible you should instead use your GBP account for SEK/PLN payments or set up a SEK/PLN bank account (using something like Wise) to receive your SEK/PLN funds into.

Short term, one option we have seen others take in the same situation is to set up a clearing account in SEK or PLN in Xero to overcome this issue.

IMPORTANT - We recommend that you seek advice from your accountant before actioning the steps below.

Within Xero you want to go to the Accounting menu within the top menu and select Advanced Accounting

You will need to select Chart of accounts:

Then Add Account:

Finally create a new current asset account. Make sure you enable payments to this account via the tick box:

You will need to create a credit note in the same currency as the invoice to clear the invoice from the Aged Receivables balance.

You can see in the example below that the invoice we are trying to match against is in PLN.

Create credit note with the same date, same currency and same amount as the invoice you are matching against.

(You may want to include a narrative about moving the balance to a suspense account for an audit trail)

The credit note will need to be allocated to the Suspense account to match against the receipt that was earlier allocated there.

Once the credit note has been approved you can allocate the balance against the original invoice:

IMPORTANT - Manual journals are usually recommended for accountants/bookkeepers and those that are experienced at managing the general ledger. You may not have the option to post a manual journal within your user settings.

Once the credit note and payment have been allocated to the suspense account there will be a small difference - this will be a foreign exchange gain/loss that is to be realised.

In this example there is a 29p difference sat on the balance sheet

To clear that from the balance sheet you need to create a manual journal.

You can see below that the accounting entry is

(If the balance was a negative amount within Current Assets the balance would be a liability and the journal would be the other way around)

Here you can see that the suspense account has balanced off to nil. You can see the credit note that was posted (dated the original invoice date), the receipt received and the currency gain/loss.