Foreign Receivables Tool

Executive Summary

Description of Business

At one of my previous employers, I worked extensively with a company that had a significant number of foreign receivables from sales to foreign customers. These foreign receivables exposed the company to foreign exchange risk and created foreign exchange gains and losses that had to be tracked for the company’s income statement. This company lacked the resources for a sophisticated accounting system and manually tracked the foreign exchange gain and loss related to these foreign receivables in a separate spreadsheet. Each time the spreadsheet was updated, the user had to search the Internet to find current exchange rates for a number of currencies and recalculate the foreign exchange gain or loss based on the new exchange rates. This process was very repetitive and time consuming and was prone to human error.

Overview of System

In order to eliminate the need to manually search for exchange rates and remove the error involved in the process of updating the foreign receivables spreadsheet, I designed a system to (1) view currency trends for a user-specified period of time; (2) add, edit, and search foreign receivable records; and (3) automatically retrieve current exchange rates and calculate total foreign exchange gain or loss based on the most current exchange rates.


Final Project Report
Final Project Workbook