Multi currency facility

[ianwilson]

I have a need to handle multiple currencies on Bank genie. I just need to be able to manually manage these bank accounts. I am not aware of the European and US banks offering the facilities to down load transactions so entries to non UK accounts would have to be done manually, I know that the system can be used as is and everything works OK except when you get to the Net Worth programme which then becomes meaningless.

The only problem with currencies is their conversion rates change! so it would be necessary to keep a table with this conversion factor which would need updating prior to looking at Net worth. This would mean having a separate table with currency code and conversion factor. It may be better to use the ISO standard currency definitions for the currency codes rather than try to use symbols as we don't have symbols for all different currencies. This would mean that the system could be used for any currency in the world.

From the program point of view it doesn't matter what they are providing these can be attached to bank account record and can be matched in the table - the only time it would matter is if you would want to translate some of the common ones in to our most used £ / $ symbols on any display or report. I suppose it would need some thought where to display this code that would be attached to each bank though

Would anyone else be interested in this development?

[ideasguy]

Thanks for registering, and thanks for posting this Ian.

I was rather surprised to read on the forums associated with the (much larger) Bank Genie competitors that there were complaints about dealing with multi currency.

For others reading who are not Bank Genie users, Bank Genie can handle any currency individually per Bank Account or Credit Card account.
If all your accounts are US or CA $ or GBP(£) then the Net worth program can simply add the figures and arrive at the Net Worth value .
The problem arises when you have a number of accounts of different currency, as the program needs to convert to a common currency before adding the balances.

I'm looking forward to the challenge of making the Net Worth program cope with multi currencies, Ian.
It really is not a big task to arrive at a simple solution.
I will look first at finding the easiest way possible to allow users to refreshing the conversation rates, within Bank Genie, automatically at the click of a button if at all possible (needs an internet connection).

[ideasguy]

Latest news.

This is looking REAL good 

You may have heard of Web Services. Visual Foxpro is perfect for consuming web services. I went looking for a web service to convert currency which I could hook up to from Bank Genie. The costs were too expensive for me (typically $995).

So, I set about using some code I found on the Foxite forum.
It allows you to capture the content of a web page.
Ive managed to build code to:
a) Send the request for an exchange rate (say USD to GBP) to the Yahoo Finance web page
http://finance.yahoo.com/currency?u
b) Kick off the query
c) Return the content of the result page to my program
d) Extract (parse) the Exchange rate from the web page content.
In test mode Ive set it up to query 5 exchange rates (e.g. one for each of 5 Bank Accounts) , one after the other, and displayed the results in a list box.
It works a treat!

Now, it?s a simple matter to build that into the Net Worth program.
I'm kinda pleased with that development.

More on this next week

[ideasguy]

Ive now got this working in Bank Genie 3.
Some more to do (help etc), then I'll post updates and instructions.

[ideasguy]

This facility has now been provided, Ian

Have a look under the Whats New section in the Bank Genie board

Thanks for the suggestion. It was fun developing this! Took a little longer than expected to bring it to release level.
Had to make it User Friendly and Intuitive   
Well, I did my best