Anyone else still manually converting inventory prices in Xero for different currencies?
I’ve been using Xero for a while and keep running into the same issue: inventory items only support one sales price in the base currency. Even if you’re on a higher plan with multi-currency enabled, when you create a quote or invoice for a foreign-currency…
I’ve been using Xero for a while and keep running into the same issue: inventory items only support one sales price in the base currency. Even if you’re on a higher plan with multi-currency enabled, when you create a quote or invoice for a foreign-currency customer, the system still pulls the base currency price. You have to calculate and overwrite the Unit Amount every single time. This has been a known gap for years (there’s a long-running Product Idea about it), but it still hasn’t been addressed. I’ve been dealing with it myself and it’s tedious, especially when rates move or you have multiple items on one invoice. Just curious how other small business owners handle this in practice — do you keep separate price lists in spreadsheets, use a third-party inventory system, or just accept the manual work? Would appreciate hearing what’s working for people.
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Thank for your feedback, I’m trying to build something similar as my my business plan but not sure how much people are facing the same issue and experience with me.
That is a great point of view, actually I am trying to build something to help the manual process, your advice is very useful and it is the view I never considered. Thank you!
The manual overwrite is annoying but honestly the bigger risk is the one nobody checks: what rate got applied and when. If you're keying the converted price at quote time but invoicing days or weeks later, you've either eaten a swing or accidentally overcharged, and unless you're writing down which rate you used per line, you can't reconstruct it later when a customer disputes an invoice. A separate price list only fixes the "supports one currency" problem, it doesn't fix the timing problem. If you go the spreadsheet route, at minimum log the rate and timestamp next to each converted price, not just the final number. Same principle applies whether you're doing it manually, in a spreadsheet, or in whatever system eventually replaces the manual step - the failure mode isn't the math, it's not having a record of which rate you used when someone asks six weeks later.
I've run into similar limitations in other accounting systems. If I had to automate it, I'd probably use the Xero API to pull the inventory items, fetch the current exchange rate, apply any pricing rules (markup, rounding, etc.), and then generate the foreign-currency quote automatically instead of manually updating every line. It wouldn't really be a currency converter—the main value is removing the repetitive copy/paste work. Curious if anyone here has already built something similar.