The moment a fit-out contractor wins work outside the UK, a quiet second job appears alongside the real one: keeping the currency straight. A tenant fit-out in Dublin priced in euros. A framework in Zurich that pays in francs. A data-centre package for a US client who wants everything in dollars. Suddenly the estimate lives in one currency, the accounts want another, and somewhere in between sits a spreadsheet full of hand-typed exchange rates that nobody quite trusts.
That spreadsheet is where cross-currency margin goes to die. A rate typed in on the day of tender, never updated. A €480,000 order and a CHF 90,000 order added together as if they were the same number. A final account that reconciles to a figure the client's finance team can't match. None of it is fraud or incompetence — it's just what happens when foreign currency is bolted on with manual arithmetic instead of built into the model.
Set the currency once, and lock it
On a Vyntworks job with multi-currency switched on, the currency isn't an afterthought — it's a decision you make when you raise the quote. You pick the currency on the new quote, priced in the same denomination you'll deliver and invoice in, and once the quote is first saved that currency is locked. You can't accidentally re-denominate a live job halfway through, which is exactly the mistake that turns a European project into a reconciliation nightmare.
Supported currencies today are pound sterling, euro, US dollar and Swiss franc — the four that cover the vast majority of UK contractors' overseas work. GBP always stays the base reporting currency underneath, so however many currencies your portfolio spans, your CVR, WIP and management accounts still roll up into one number you can report on.
The rate is captured, not guessed
Here's the part that kills the side spreadsheet. When a non-GBP project is created, Vyntworks captures the live exchange rate automatically from the European Central Bank's published feed — no one types it in. Open a foreign-currency project and you'll see an amber currency chip under the title bar, reading something like EUR @ 0.8800 to GBP. That chip is the single, visible source of truth for how this job converts back to sterling.
If your contract or your bank fixed a specific rate, click the chip and enter a manual override — one unit of the project currency expressed in pounds — and that becomes the rate the job uses. It's a deliberate choice you can point to, not a stale figure buried in cell G14 of a workbook. And because that locked rate is what gets sent through to your accounts package on every foreign PO and invoice, reconciliation stays penny-perfect even if the various rate sources drift apart over the life of the job.
Where the spreadsheet really falls apart: mixed-currency orders
Single-currency conversion is the easy case. The genuine gymnastics start when one project buys in more than one currency — say the main packages in euros but a specialist supplier invoices in francs. Add those order values together at face value and your committed-cost figure is simply wrong; you're summing euros and francs as though they were the same unit.
Vyntworks converts each order from its own currency to the project currency at that order's locked rate before summing, everywhere the numbers roll up — the project home grid, the CVR, overspend checks and the section breakdown. So a job whose purchase orders span euros and francs shows a genuinely accurate combined committed figure, not an optimistic total that only looks right until someone checks it. Each order still shows its own native face value on the order itself; it's only the cross-order totals that get normalised. Single-currency jobs are untouched and behave exactly as before.
That's the difference between a system that knows it's handling multiple currencies and a spreadsheet that's merely storing them next to each other.
Report in one currency, trade in four
The pay-off is that the foreign-currency job stops being a special case you have to remember to treat carefully. You price it in its own currency, you raise orders and invoices in the currencies your suppliers and clients actually use, and every figure that matters for control — earned, committed, actual, gross profit — converts back to sterling on a rate you can see and defend. No parallel workbook, no month-end panic when the rate you typed in March no longer matches reality.
Multi-currency is a company setting an admin turns on — no add-on, no separate module. If you run work across borders and you're tired of the spreadsheet doing the currency maths, book a walkthrough and we'll set up one of your own cross-currency jobs so you can watch the numbers reconcile themselves.