Multi-Currency Invoicing: What Travel Agencies Get Wrong

A ticket priced by an airline in US dollars, sold to a client who pays in euros, and reported to the BSP in yet another reference rate — this is a normal Tuesday for an agency working international routes, and it's exactly the kind of arithmetic that spreadsheets handle inconsistently between agents.

Store the original currency, not just the converted total

If a booking only records the final EUR amount, you lose the ability to reconcile against the original GDS fare or explain a discrepancy to a client months later. The fare amount, its original currency, the exchange rate applied and the date it was applied all need to be stored — not just the result.

Pick one exchange-rate policy and apply it everywhere

Whether you use the BSP's own rate, a daily bank rate, or a fixed markup over the interbank rate, the important part is consistency: the same booking should never be converted two different ways depending on which report generated the number.

Rounding differences are not errors — until they're unexplained

A few cents of difference between the GDS-reported amount and the client-facing invoice is normal in multi-currency operations. What matters is that the difference is visible and attributable to the conversion, not buried inside a total that no longer adds up when someone checks it.