Wednesday 16 April 2014

Use Google Finance to convert currencies for you

Google Sheets is able to leverage many Google services, like Google Translate and Google Finance, to make your job easier.

Google Finance ties into Google Sheets with the helpful function =GoogleFinance(). You can use this to quickly and easily convert currencies in your Blink Reports for Xero spreadsheet.

For example, say a business operates in the EU, and thus in Euros, but you want to report your financials in US dollars. Wouldn't it be easier to have a cell in your spreadsheet that tells you the exchange rate at a glance?


In our case, we've simply entered the =GoogleFinance() function in the report parameters, so that we can now both call it in other sheets and reference it at a glance. It's best if this goes on the Report Parameters sheet so that there's no chance of it being overwritten by data coming in from Xero via Blink Reports.

In a blank cell, use the following function to automatically grab up-to-date exchange rates from Google Finance:
=GoogleFinance("CURRENCY:<SourceCurrencySymbol><ToCurrencySymbol>")
So if you want the Euros to US dollars exchange rate, the formula would read:
=GoogleFinance("CURRENCY:EURUSD")
The formula works with a number of common ISO 4217 currency codes, so most major currencies will be easily converted all from within your spreadsheet.

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