Amounts and their currency

Why some amounts carry a currency mark and others do not, and what decides it.

The same "1,234.50" is dollars in Chicago, riyals in Riyadh and rupees in Meruvani. The currency is the company’s, read from the company record, picked up at sign-in and kept in step by the company switcher.

Where the mark appears is decided per table rather than per cell, because the alternative is noise:

• If the rows carry a currency column they may disagree with each other, so every amount is marked. A ledger holding a dollar invoice next to a euro one must not label both with the company’s currency.
• If they do not, every row is in the company’s currency — so it is said once, in the column heading, and the cells stay bare numbers that line up down the column.

Totals rows, line-item totals, dashboard tiles and every figure in a report or on a board carry the mark, including the compact form. A symbol is used where one is short, unambiguous and present in every font; the ISO code where it is not — so "SAR 1,234.50" rather than a glyph that renders as an empty box in the fonts a console is actually read in.

A list whose rows are in more than one currency is totalled in the company’s currency: each foreign row shows its own amount with "≈" and its value in the company’s currency beneath, and the total adds those. See Totals in the company’s currency.

Each amount in its own record’s currency

An amount is shown in the currency of the record it belongs to, not in the company’s just because the company is where you are signed in. An employee paid in rupees shows base pay in INR, on the list and on the record, beside a colleague paid in dollars.

• The total under a list names a currency only when every record it adds up is in that currency.
• When the records are in more than one currency, they are converted to the reporting currency and the total says so — including how many records had no rate and were left out.
• The total is labelled the same way on every page of the list, so turning a page never changes what the total claims to be in.