Currency Conversion Rates (30 Dec 96)
You can download the "official Kagi exchange rates" as a Macintosh Register resource file or as a text file.You do not have to use these rates, you can make up your own since it is your money that we will be collecting. However, do not add additional countries to the list.
The rates are set into the Register programs and those programs will live out on the internet for several years. So if you release a new version of the Register program, the odds are very good that two years from now those exchange rates will still be used by some payers who have old versions of your software (and thus old versions of the Register program). Because of this, the exchange rates in the Register program are typically set at 8% higher than market rates. The last update is listed in the title of this FAQ and on that day, the rates were obtained and multiplied by 1.08. You can of course alter your rates if you wish because it will only affect your payments and no others.
There are three other interesting pieces of information contained in the currency conversion rate files; country name, currencies allowed and demonination values.
We have attempted to spell the name of each country using the spelling used by that country. For example, Japan is the english name for the country that calls itself Nippon. We use Nippon. The only exception to this is tildes and umlats are removed from the country names because some email systems and computers around the world do the wrong thing when they see characters that are outside the standard ASCII character set.
The list of countries is determined by what country currencies Kagi's commercial bank will accept for currency exchange. Do not add additional countries to the list because we will not be able to convert cash payments received in currencies from other countries.
The denomination values show the lowest and the next lowest denominations for that currency in paper money. For example, Canada has a 2 and a 5 but the 1 is a coin. This information is used to present the payer with an amount that can be paid using only paper currency, no coins.
The register program adds up all the purchase prices to obtain a total US Dollar value. That amount is multiplied by the currency conversion rate. That converted amount is rounded to the nearest amount that can be paid for using that currencies paper currency.
Modification Date: Thursday, July 25, 1996