Set your functional currency
Your functional currency is the single currency your organisation keeps its books in — its home, or reporting, currency. This guide explains what it is, when it is set, and why it cannot be changed afterwards.
Before you begin
- The functional currency is chosen — and confirmed — when you create the organisation. You do not need to set it up separately, and you cannot change it later.
What the functional currency is for
Every organisation has exactly one functional currency. It matters because:
- All your reports and ledger balances are shown in it — your Profit & Loss, VAT Summary, aged receivables and payables, and every account balance are expressed in this currency, whatever currency the individual documents were in.
- It is the fallback currency for new documents. A document takes its currency from its parent document, then the customer's or supplier's preferred currency, and finally your functional currency if nothing else applies.
- It is the currency foreign-currency amounts are converted into. When you raise or get paid on a document in another currency, Sales Scribe converts the figures back to your functional currency for your books.
Where it is set
You choose the Currency when you create the organisation, alongside the Country. It starts as your country's currency — change it there if your books are kept in another one (a UK business that trades and reports in euros, for example).
Before you select Create Organization, the wizard names the currency you have chosen and asks you to tick I confirm my base currency is …. The tick is for that currency only: if you change the currency afterwards, the tick is cleared and you confirm again.
Afterwards the currency is shown, read-only, as Base currency on the Organization page (Settings → Organization).
[Screenshot required: the Get Started wizard's base-currency confirmation]
Why it cannot be changed
Every amount in your books is kept in this currency — not only posted transactions but also a draft's exchange rate, your products' cost prices, your customers' credit limits and the balances you brought across from another system. Changing it would silently relabel all of them: £1,000 would become €1,000 without anything being converted. So it is fixed from the moment the organisation is created, as it is in other accounting software.
If you chose the wrong currency, create the organisation again with the right one. While an organisation is new that costs nothing, and you can delete the one you no longer need.