Currencies and foreign exchange in Business Central
How Business Central handles multi-currency — local vs additional reporting currency, exchange rate sources, revaluation, and rounding.
Business Central handles multi-currency natively, and the patterns that hold for one foreign currency hold for fifty. The key is to understand which currency is which.
Local currency (LCY). Every company has a single local currency — the currency of its statutory financial statements. The GL is always posted in LCY. Transactions in foreign currencies are converted to LCY at the transaction date's exchange rate and the LCY amount is what the trial balance shows.
Foreign currency. Customers, vendors, and bank accounts can be assigned a default foreign currency. Documents inherit it. Each posted transaction stores both the foreign currency amount and the LCY-equivalent, so reports can run either way.
Additional reporting currency (ACY). A company can nominate one additional reporting currency — typically the parent group's currency. Every posted GL entry is then also recorded in ACY, using either the daily rate or an average, so a Swedish subsidiary posting in SEK can produce parallel financial reports in EUR or USD without consolidation.
Exchange rates. Rates are maintained in the Currency Exchange Rates table — manually or imported via a service. Microsoft ships a built-in integration to a public ECB feed; partners offer commercial feeds (OANDA, central bank APIs) on AppSource. Each rate has a starting date so historical postings re-translate consistently.
Revaluation. Period-end FX revaluation is run as a batch routine on customer, vendor, and bank ledger entries, producing unrealized gain/loss postings to nominated GL accounts. Realized FX is posted automatically when foreign-currency invoices are settled by foreign-currency payments at a different rate.
Rounding. Currency cards configure rounding precision and method (Nearest, Up, Down) per currency, plus invoice-level rounding for cash-paying currencies and dust adjustments on multi-line foreign-currency invoices.
Sales and purchase pricing. Item price lists can be defined per currency; conversion at posting is optional or driven by a configured rate.
Limits. Business Central does not include a treasury management module. Hedging, FX forwards, and netting beyond simple intercompany are typically delivered by an ISV add-on or — for organisations with serious treasury complexity — a dedicated treasury system integrated to BC.
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