Prices, currencies and taxes

You’ll need: Products, Taxes, Currencies — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Getting money right is mostly getting three separate things right: what you charge, in which currency, and what tax applies on top.

Prices are per currency

A product’s prices field holds a value for each currency your business trades in. It is not one price converted at display time — it is the price you actually charge in that currency, which is what lets you price sensibly in each market instead of exposing yesterday’s exchange rate to your customers.

This is why the currency list from Essentials had to be right before anybody entered money. Add a currency later and every existing product is missing a price in it.

FCFA behaves properly

A wallet or display currency can be pegged to the ISO currency that governs its formatting and decimal places, so FCFA shows as customers expect rather than as bare digits. You do not have to do anything for this; it is worth knowing it exists so that a correctly formatted amount does not look like a coincidence.

Taxes are referenced, never typed

A tax record holds a tax code, a percentage, and the country and state it applies in. Documents point at the tax record rather than copying the number.

This is the single most important habit in this lesson, and it is the same principle as the settings lesson in Essentials:

   invoice ---points at---> VAT 19.25%
   invoice ---points at---> VAT 19.25%
   quote   ---points at---> VAT 19.25%
                                 ^
                  change this number and you have
                  changed what all three of them mean

When a rate changes, add the new rate and use it going forward. Editing the old one silently rewrites the tax on documents you issued last year, and nothing on screen warns you it happened.

What to check before you publish a price

• Is there a price in every currency you actually sell in?
• Is the unit stated, if the price is per kilo, metre or box?
• Is the right tax attached, for the right country?
• Is the price inclusive or exclusive of that tax, in the way your customers expect?

That last one is a business decision rather than a setting to discover. Decide it once, write it down, and be consistent — a catalogue where some prices include tax and others do not is impossible to fix later without checking every record.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, price a product in two currencies and attach a tax, then look at how it presents on the public page. Then create a second tax rate rather than editing the first, which is the habit worth building before it costs you.