Collect what you earn, convert when it suits you.

The challenge: revenue that arrives in someone else's currency

When you invoice an overseas customer, they will often want to pay you in their own currency — a euro-based customer paying in euros, a US customer paying in dollars. If your only option is to receive that payment into a sterling account, your bank typically converts it automatically at a rate you had little say over, on a day you didn't choose. Multiply that across dozens or hundreds of invoices a year and the cumulative cost, and the lack of control, becomes significant.

There is also a planning problem. If a meaningful share of your revenue is denominated in a foreign currency, your sterling turnover — and therefore your margin, once fixed sterling costs are taken into account — moves with the exchange rate even if nothing about your underlying business has changed. That makes budgeting and pricing decisions harder, particularly if you are trying to plan investment or hiring around expected revenue.

How TimeFX helps

We help exporters set up multi-currency receiving details so customers can pay directly in their own currency, without a middleman conversion happening before the money reaches you. That gives you the choice of when — and whether — to convert into sterling, rather than having that decision made automatically at the point of receipt.

Where you have predictable future receipts — a signed contract, a recurring retainer, or a pattern of seasonal export orders — a forward contract lets you agree today's exchange rate for converting that revenue when it actually lands. This can help you quote prices to UK-based stakeholders, plan margin, or simply budget with more confidence, without needing to guess where rates will be in three or six months' time.

Typical patterns we see

Exporters we work with typically fall into a few groups: businesses invoicing a small number of large overseas customers on agreed payment terms; businesses selling across many smaller international customers, often through distributors or agents in each market; and businesses with a mix of both, alongside seasonal peaks tied to order cycles or trade shows. Each pattern changes how much value a multi-currency account and forward cover add — a business with one large annual export contract has very different needs from one collecting frequent smaller payments across a dozen currencies.

A worked scenario (illustrative)

Consider a UK manufacturer that exports to a distributor in the eurozone, invoicing €50,000 a month on 30-day terms. If sterling strengthens against the euro between invoicing and payment, the sterling value of that recurring revenue falls each month through no fault of the underlying business relationship. A forward contract agreed at the start of the quarter, covering the expected euro receipts for the following three months, would have fixed the sterling value of that revenue in advance — useful for a business trying to plan cash flow or meet a fixed sterling cost base. This is illustrative only: the right amount of cover, if any, depends on how confident you are in the timing and size of future receipts.

What to prepare before applying

• The currencies and countries your customers typically pay from.
• Rough monthly or annual export revenue by currency.
• Whether receipts are one-off, recurring, or seasonal.
• Your company registration details and a short description of what you export.