Dealing with multi-currency receipts and overseas purchases

If you've ever bought a SaaS subscription, a piece of overseas-only hardware, or anything from a US Apple Store, you've got USD receipts in your inbox. Handling them correctly at tax time is straightforward once you know what the ATO actually wants.

Store the receipt in its native currency

Don't convert receipts to AUD when you save them. Keep the original USD, EUR or GBP exactly as the vendor sent it. The conversion is a tax-time calculation, not a record-keeping decision, and conversion rates move daily — pinning a receipt to one rate at capture time is the wrong call.

The Paper Keep stores currency on each receipt and does the tax-time arithmetic for you: when your summary is in AUD, foreign amounts show an ≈ A$ equivalent converted at the ATO monthly average rate for that receipt's month. Footnotes on the summary flag any receipt whose currency or month isn't covered — and a bucket with a gap shows no estimate at all rather than a misleading partial number.

The rates are the ATO's own

The Australian Taxation Office publishes average exchange rates — monthly and annual — derived from Reserve Bank data, and those are the rates it accepts for converting foreign-currency expenses on your return. The Paper Keep imports that monthly table automatically and converts each receipt at the rate for the month it was incurred, which is the more precise of the two published options.

If you'd rather use the daily rate for a single very large purchase, the ATO accepts that too; pick one method and apply it consistently across the return. The native amounts on your receipts stay untouched either way.

Foreign GST? Not your problem

VAT in the EU, sales tax in the US, GST in NZ — these aren't Australian GST and aren't claimable as input tax credits on your BAS. Don't try to recover them through your Australian return. Some EU countries let visitors claim VAT back at the airport on physical goods over a threshold; that's a separate process and not relevant to ongoing business expenses.

The total on the receipt is what you spent. Convert that total to AUD at the agreed rate; that's what you claim.

Currency conversion fees count too

Your bank or card provider charges a conversion fee — typically 2-3% — every time you spend in a foreign currency. That fee is a deductible business expense if the underlying purchase was deductible. It usually shows up on your bank or credit card statement, not on the merchant's receipt.

Worth knowing because over a year of overseas SaaS subscriptions, those fees add up. Categorise them under "Bank fees" or "Foreign exchange" and they go on the return like any other operating cost.

The zero-decimal currencies trap

Japanese yen and Korean won don't have decimal places. A receipt for ¥4,800 is four thousand eight hundred yen, not forty-eight. Most parsers handle this correctly, but glance at the total when it lands — if your hotel in Tokyo shows up as $4,800 on the AUD-equivalent line, you've hit a parsing bug. Edit the receipt, set currency to JPY, and the total will recalculate.

What about crypto?

If you've paid for something in crypto, you've made two transactions for ATO purposes: a disposal of an asset (the crypto), then a purchase (the goods). Both need records. The receipt covers the second; your crypto exchange's transaction history covers the first. Keep them paired.

This works even better inside The Paper Keep — start a 14-day free trial.