Converting currency is trivial. Choosing the date is the whole job.

Every multi-currency GP has had this conversation.

Someone asks for one consolidated view — the EUR fund, the GBP fund and the JPY fund, all expressed in dollars. It's a reasonable request. It's also a request for about forty small decisions that nobody wants to make on the record.

Because the multiplication isn't the problem. Anyone can multiply. The problem is that each figure needs a different date's rate, and the correct date depends on what the figure actually represents.

The question that has no default answer

Take a capital call. Two amounts matter: what was called, and what was actually collected.

Those happened on different days. Between them the rate moved. Convert both at the same date and you've produced a shortfall — or a surplus — that exists only in your reporting.

Now scale that across a fund's whole activity. An account entry belongs to its reporting date. A remittance payment belongs to the day the money landed. A distribution belongs to its payment date. A commitment belongs to the day it was made. A portfolio investment's cost belongs to the investment date and never changes — but its fair market value belongs to the date of the latest valuation, which moves every time a new valuation lands.

Record	Rate date used
Account entries	The reporting date
Remittance payments	The date the money was received
Capital calls	The remittance (call) date
Distributions	The distribution's payment date
Commitment adjustments	The adjustment's "as of" date
Capital commitments	The commitment date
Portfolio investment — cost	The investment date
Portfolio investment — FMV	The date of the latest valuation

That table is the product. Everything else is arithmetic.

What the manual version actually costs

The workbook version isn't wrong because people are careless. It's wrong because it's re-derived.

Someone builds the consolidation for Q1. They make eight reasonable date decisions, most of them undocumented, some of them in cell formulas nobody will read again. Next quarter, under time pressure, someone extends it. A year later a different person adds the new fund and picks a defensible date — a different defensible date.

Nothing about that is negligent. It's just what happens when a rule lives in a formula instead of a policy. And you generally discover it when an auditor asks why the same commitment converts at two different rates in two different reports.

⚙️ Under the hood: the three rules that keep it honest

Percentages are never converted. Anything expressed as a percentage — an ownership stake, an allocation share — is currency-neutral and stays exactly as it is. Obvious when stated; a classic workbook bug when a whole column gets multiplied by a rate because it happened to be adjacent to amounts.

FMV always refreshes. An investment's cost is set once, at the investment date, and never moves. Its tracking FMV is recomputed on every run, against the most recent valuation and that valuation's rate. Two figures on the same record, one deliberately frozen and one deliberately live — because they're describing different kinds of fact.

Missing rates skip, they never guess. If a rate isn't available for a date the conversion needs, that record is skipped and administrators are alerted so the rate can be supplied. It is not interpolated from a neighbouring day. It is not carried forward from the last known rate.

That third one is the rule I'd argue for hardest, because the alternatives are so seductive. Carrying yesterday's rate forward produces a complete, plausible, confident report — with a figure in it that no market ever offered. A gap that announces itself is worth more than a number that quietly isn't true.

And when a historical rate is later corrected — as they are — an administrator can force a recalculation, so the restated figures come back into line rather than preserving an error because it's already been reported.

Two currencies, side by side, permanently

The tracking figure never replaces the base-currency figure. It sits beside it.

That matters more than it sounds. The fund's own currency remains the fund's own currency — for its LPs, its accounts, its LPA. The tracking currency is a reporting lens laid over the top, maintained automatically for any fund whose tracking currency differs from its base.

So the IC gets its one consolidated view, and nobody had to restate the fund's actual books to produce it.

	Consolidation workbook	Maintained tracking currency
Rate-date rules	In cell formulas, per tab	Documented, one per record type
Consistency across quarters	Depends who built it	Identical
Missing rate	Someone picks something	Record skipped, admin alerted
Corrected historical rate	Re-do the affected tabs	Force a recalculation
FMV freshness	As at whenever the tab was built	Recomputed every run
Base-currency books	Untouched (usually)	Untouched (always)

📊 The impact

Before: a quarterly workbook restating several funds into one currency, with the rate date for each figure chosen by whoever built the tab, and no practical way to prove two reports used the same rule.

After: every restated figure sits beside its base-currency original, converted on a documented rule per record type, refreshed automatically, with missing rates surfaced rather than filled in.

The question worth asking your own team: for the last consolidated report you produced, which date's rate was used for the capital calls — and can two people answer that the same way without opening the file?

What to take from this

See it on your own structure

If you run funds in more than one currency, the diagnostic is quick: take one commitment and one distribution, and check which date's rate each was converted at in your last two consolidated reports.

If they don't match, DM me — that's precisely the drift this is built to remove.