Exchange rates touch every foreign currency transaction, revaluation and consolidation. Most organizations import rates daily without thinking about it, until a feed fails or a wrong rate posts and has to be corrected across hundreds of transactions. This guide covers how to make rate imports in Dynamics 365 Finance reliable and auditable.
How Finance handles exchange rates
Finance and Supply Chain Management stores rates by exchange rate type, currency pair and date. Different rate types serve different purposes, for example a daily rate for transactions, a month-end rate for revaluation, and an average rate for consolidation. Finance includes an import process with a provider framework that can fetch rates on a schedule.
Decide your sources
- Primary source: often the central bank for your accounting currency. For Canadian companies, the Bank of Canada publishes daily rates for major currencies.
- Fallback source: what happens if the primary source is late, unavailable or doesn't publish a currency you need.
- Policy: which source your auditors and tax filings expect, documented in your accounting policies.
Rate types and conventions
- Which rate types exist and which processes use each.
- Direct or indirect quotation, and how inverse rates are stored.
- Cross rates through a base currency when a direct quote is not published.
- Rate units, such as rates quoted per 100 units, and decimals.
Validation before rates are stored
Automated imports should check rates before they reach the system:
- Freshness: refuse publications older than an agreed limit.
- Movement tolerance: hold rates that move more than a set percentage from the previous rate, until someone reviews them.
- Completeness: flag expected currency pairs that didn't arrive.
- Conflicts: reject inconsistent quotes for the same pair and date.
- Overwrite rules: replace existing rates only when explicitly allowed.
Scheduling
- Run imports after the source publishes, with retries for temporary failures.
- Align timing with when transactions are posted, especially across time zones.
- Run a separate check before month-end revaluation.
Audit trail
For each import, keep the date, source, request, response summary, rates accepted, rates held and who approved them. Auditors should be able to see where any rate came from.
Our extension
Our Multisource Exchange Rate Management extension connects Finance and Supply Chain Management to public exchange rate APIs, starting with a ready-made Bank of Canada profile. It supports other JSON or XML feeds without code, direct, inverse and cross rates, movement tolerance with approval, stale and missing data checks, preview and test modes, and a complete run history. Accepted rates pass through the standard import process.
Next step
Send an exchange rate enquiry, or see our other Finance and Operations services.