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Currency Exchange Rates

Hotel, car rental and ground transport bookings often arrive priced in a foreign currency while you invoice in your own. Travel Business Connector converts those amounts when the sales order is created, using the exchange rates stored in Business Central.

Updating Exchange Rates​

Rates come from the Frankfurter rate service, which publishes European Central Bank rates. Currencies the ECB does not publish (for example AED) are fetched automatically from a fallback service, open.er-api.com, so virtually every currency gets a rate.

Rates update automatically every night at 05:00 through a job queue entry that the app sets up for you. You normally do not need to do anything -- fresh rates are in place before the working day starts.

You can also update on demand -- for example right after adding a new currency:

  1. Search for Currencies (Alt+Q).
  2. Choose Update Exchange Rates.
  3. You get a confirmation message when the rates have been updated.

One click fetches every rate at once, quoted against your company's own currency, and stores a rate for each currency that is already set up on the Currencies page. Currencies you have not set up are skipped, so add the currency first if it is new to you.

If your administrator tells you the nightly job has stopped (it shows an error in the Job Queue), rates keep their last value -- run the manual update until the job is running again.

How Rates Apply to Bookings​

When a booking is turned into a sales order, the system:

  1. Picks the most recent rate dated on or before the work date for that currency. Note that it is the work date that counts, not the date the booking was made.
  2. Converts the amount to your own currency.
  3. Adds the currency rate markup -- a percentage that protects the agency against exchange rate movements between the booking and the settlement. It is set in AIR Setup as Currency Rate Markup % and is 5% unless your administrator changed it.
  4. Rounds the result to a whole amount.

Customers with Excl. Currency Rate Markup enabled on the Customer Card are converted at the plain rate, with no markup added. Because this changes what the customer pays, only use it where it has been agreed.

Every conversion is written to the import log for the booking, including the rate used, the markup and the amount before markup, so you can always see how a price was calculated.

Missing or Outdated Rates​

  • No rate at all for the currency -- processing fails and the import shows an error saying no exchange rate was found for that currency. This is the case you have to fix.
  • A rate exists but is old -- the booking is processed with the most recent rate available. You are not warned, so keep the update routine.

To resolve a missing rate:

  1. If the currency is not set up yet, add it on the Currencies page.
  2. Choose Update Exchange Rates.
  3. Process the import again.

Rate Update Failed​

If the rate update cannot find a rate for a currency in either rate service, it marks that currency with Rate Update Failed on the Currencies page (the manual update also tells you which currencies were affected).

While the mark is set, bookings in that currency are stopped on purpose -- processing fails with an error pointing at the currency rather than silently using an old rate.

To resolve it:

  1. Find out the current exchange rate for the currency.
  2. Open Currencies, select the currency and choose Exch. Rates to enter the rate manually.
  3. Turn on Accept Manual Rate for the currency -- this clears the Rate Update Failed mark and tells the nightly update that your manual rate is accepted.
  4. Process the import again.

A currency with Accept Manual Rate is never blocked, but it is still included in every automatic update -- if a rate service starts covering the currency later, the automatic rate simply takes over. Check your manually maintained rates regularly; nothing warns you when they get old.

Keeping rates current prevents processing delays and keeps invoice amounts accurate.