CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi folks,
First of I'd be interested to know if any other people can see a need for such a feature. I saw just one or two people asking for how to do this in the forums. So that's not many.

By my way of thinking this feature would make CiviCRM far more international in its scope... in terms of what sort of organisations it is suitable for.

The feature is this:
1) Have a base currency for the site --- got that now

2) Have a default list of currencies that will be made available on all $$ related items/functions. Whenever something is priced or has a $ value associated with it, there will also be a currency associated with it, with the options for such being restricted to this list.
    With this, the admin can choose the currencies he/she wishes to handle. This might be based on what currencies the organisation is able to process through their payment processor (a bank, Paypal, or whatever).

3) Integration with one of the various online currency exchange systems (xe.com, etc.). The admin can then manually update the currency rates or a cron job (or some other automated way) could be set up to automatically update the currency rates

4) Events will have a base price setting --- got that now

and

5) Events will also have a base currency setting... taken from the drop-down list generated based on what was selected in #2 above
5.1) Donations and other monetary transactions with also have a currency selector... so that the person paying the money can choose what currency it is in (from the list, see #2 above)

6) On the front end the user can select which currency they wish to see pricing for and to make payment in
    If the event was originally set up as AUD 200 and the customer sets the site to US$ then the site will convert all pricing to US$ using the rate for AUD to US$ as obtained in #3 above.

7) The currency used and the converted price will be stored with the event registration or with the donation, or what have you.

8) The currency variable sent from CiviCRM to the payment processor will be the one selected by the customer and stored with the event or donation, etc.

....
That's about the gist of it.

I don't have the money to pay for development of this. Someone suggested it might be in the order of $10,000 (100 hours).
I am a one man show who happened to think CiviCRM was a fantastic solution to my contact and event management needs... until I discovered this currency limitation on the existing system.

I have written out the above on the chance someone seeing it spelt out like this will decide it's something they can impliment... or perhaps the development team take a liking to.

With thanks,

Jonathan

Seeing the CiviCRM 3.0 was out I wanted to see if any changes had been made to its currency handling.
I am still keen to see the above mention feature implemented.

You might also want to think and write down a few notes about how this affects search and summary calculations and the specific urls that are impacted with handling multi-currency

Thanks Lobo.
Actually I know very little about the "search and summary calculations", and little if anything about CiviCRM url structure.
Is currency related information passed through URLs?

I gather no one else saw the need for this feature, or if they did they didn't find this thread and comment on it.
I would have thought that any organisation that is operating (holding events) in more than one country would find this feature useful. It's not usual business practice to charge US$ for an event in New Zealand for instance, or NZ$ for an event in Finland.

Anyway... 3.0 looks nice. Keep up the great work on it.

Regards,

Jonathan

you might also want to check this out:

http://civicrm.org/node/547

a good first step in my opinion

lobo

I agree, multi-currency support would be a great addition. My organization operates in the United States and Canada, and would like to allow our supporters to choose their preferred currency.

In the meantime, the solution above sounds like it will meet our needs. Unfortunately, with my limited technical knowledge I'm not sure how to implement it. I can manage the custom template aspect, but working with hooks is new to me.

So, with that, could you provide a bit more detail on how to implement your code?

And, "Finally i had to go in and make some changes to some of the core files to allow multiple currencies and group together currencies of the same type" is a bit nebulous. Some clarity on the core file changes would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!!

Cheers,
Brent