Daily Spot Rate History Changes

The daily spot rate history feature can be used, as explained above, in certain sectors of commerce as an alternative to holding rates.In such cases each transaction is valued at the time it is entered at the exchange rate for the day. The currency file is designed to hold a record for each currency for each period of the year, with up to 31 different rates for each period, one per day.

As with holding rates, it is not necessary to supply an exchange rate for each day, but just for those days it has changed. If the rate for a specific day is left at zero, then applications assume that the rate was the same as the previous day, and so on until a non-zero rate is found.

The daily spot rate history is maintained from this menu option. It works in a similar fashion to the holding rate maintenance above. First you must enter the currency code you wish to work on.Note that you may use the <F4–Select> key in the usual way to list the currencies held in the file, and choose the one you want.

Year

Month

As explained above, spot rate history is held in the currency rate file, holding all the spot rates for a particular month in a table of up to 31 entries. If a history record is not yet present in the file, a new record is automatically created.The daily spot rates for the complete month are shown, and may now be updated, as shown above.

Once you have made any changes to the spot rates press the SAVE button to update the changes.

When the daily spot rate feature is used within applications, they look for a spot rate history record for the month containing the transaction date, and then choose the rate for the actual day from the table.If the rate set for the day in question is zero, then the application looks backwards in time for the first non-zero rate set, and offers that. Thus rates need not necessarily be defined for every day of a month if the rate has not changed every day. If the rate for day 1 is zero, then the rate record for the previous period is accessed and scanned backwards from day 31. The scan goes back up to three periods, at which point the application prompts with a zero rate.