Pay a foreign-currency bill in instalments from your CAD account

An overseas supplier bills you in US dollars and you pay from your Canadian account, often in pieces: a wire when you order, another when it ships, the balance on arrival. Each wire leaves your bank in CAD; the bill is owed in USD. TALISK_HQ matches every wire to the one bill and keeps the USD balance owing correct after each payment.

Match each wire to the bill

1. Open Ledger › Expenses and click the approved bill's purple Match pill.
2. Tick the wire, or several wires at once. When wires naming the supplier add up to about what the bill owes, the picker suggests them above the list: Select these ticks them for you, and nothing is matched until you confirm. A wire that is exactly the payment of another of your bills is never suggested for this one. When two different sets of wires fit the bill about equally well, TALISK_HQ suggests neither set, and you tick the wires yourself.
3. Each ticked wire gets a field for the US dollars that payment settled (labelled with the bill's currency). TALISK_HQ fills it in with an estimate at the Bank of Canada rate on the wire's date. Replace it with the US-dollar figure on your wire confirmation: your bank's rate is not the Bank of Canada's, so the estimate is only a starting point.
4. Check Still owing after these payments, then confirm.

The bill stays open with the rest owing. Come back to the same Match pill when the next wire clears.

The last wire

On the wire that clears the balance, tick This pays off the bill. TALISK_HQ puts exactly the USD still owing in that wire's field, and the bill closes. Whatever the CAD you sent comes to, Accounts Payable for the bill ends at zero.

What TALISK_HQ records

Each wire records the CAD that actually left your bank. It clears the matching share of the bill from Accounts Payable at the rate the bill was booked at. The difference is split in two: the part caused by the exchange rate moving between the bill's date and the wire's date is a foreign-exchange gain or loss, and the rest (your bank's conversion spread and any wire fee taken from the same payment) is recorded as a fee on Foreign Transaction & Card FX Fees (account 5055).

When TALISK_HQ asks about the wires while building your books

A wire that shows only a reference number does not say who was paid, so when you build your books from a folder TALISK_HQ asks what each one was for. If it could be one payment towards an approved bill in another currency, one answer reads "It paid part of" that bill, with about how much of the bill's currency it covers. Choose it and a field opens for the US dollars that wire settled, filled in with the same Bank of Canada estimate. Replace it with the figure on the wire confirmation, then record it. The wire is matched to the bill exactly as the Match pill would match it, and nothing is recorded until you confirm the figure.

A wire is offered as part of a bill only when it went out at most 30 days before the bill's date, or any time in the four months after it. Money sent earlier than that is an advance on the order, not a payment of this bill: it belongs on the supplier's proforma as a deposit, which you then apply to the bill (see "Proformas and supplier deposits").

When several of those wires together come to about what the bill still owes, TALISK_HQ also asks one question about all of them: did these payments pay the bill? It has a field for each wire, filled in with its estimate. Check each against its wire confirmation and record them together, and the bill closes when they cover it. You can still answer each wire on its own instead. Once one of them is matched that way, the combined question goes away, and TALISK_HQ asks again about the others if they still add up to what is owing.

TALISK_HQ picks those wires by how close they come to what is owing and how close together and to the bill's date they went out. A wire that is exactly the payment of another bill in your books is never one of them. When two different sets of wires fit about equally well, TALISK_HQ does not choose between them: it asks about each wire on its own instead.

If a figure is more than the bill still owes, TALISK_HQ says so and records nothing. To undo a wire recorded this way, unmatch it on the bill as below.

Undoing one wire

Unmatching one wire puts back exactly its share: its USD returns to the balance owing and its entry is removed. The other wires stay matched.

If you match a single wire from Banking

The Banking picker matches one wire at a time. Pick the US-dollar bill on the wire's line and TALISK_HQ asks how many US dollars that wire settled, the same figure the bill's Match pill asks for. This pays off the bill fills in everything still owing; it starts ticked only when nothing has been paid yet and the wire looks like the whole bill. A bill that already has a wire against it shows a Partly paid pill with the US dollars left, and stays in the list until it is paid in full. To record several wires together, use the bill's Match pill.