A Chart of Accounts Account Missing from Revaluation: What to Do
How to investigate when an account does not appear in the revaluation results — starting with the question people skip: should that account be revalued at all?
When a company records transactions in a currency other than its book currency, unsettled balances need restating at the closing rate. The difference is recognised as an unrealised foreign exchange gain or loss. In NetSuite this runs through Revalue Open Foreign Currency Balances, one of the steps in the Period Close Checklist.
The complaint usually sounds like this: there is an account with a foreign currency balance, but it never shows up in the revaluation. The temptation is to tick a setting so it does. Do not — answer the question first.
| Item type | Example accounts | Rate used |
|---|---|---|
| Monetary | Bank, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Loans | Closing rate — revalued |
| Non-monetary | Inventory, Fixed Assets, Prepayments, Equity | Historical rate — not revalued |
That determination is an accounting decision, not a technical one. Take it to the Controller or the finance team, and record the agreement. I have several times found accounts ticked years earlier by someone who has since left, with nobody able to say why.
If it genuinely should be revalued, work through this
- 01Open the account record in the Chart of Accounts and check the Revalue Open Balance for Foreign Currency Transactions box. Without it, the account is skipped. This is by far the most common cause.
- 02Check the account type. Not every type offers the revaluation option; Receivables, Payables and Bank are handled by their own mechanism.
- 03Confirm the balance really is in a foreign currency. Transactions in the same currency as the subsidiary's book currency produce no exchange difference at all.
- 04Check the Currency Exchange Rates table — a rate must exist for that currency on the period end date. A missing rate makes the account drop out silently.
- 05Confirm the Unrealized Gain/Loss account is set in the accounting preferences. Without a contra account, no revaluation journal can be formed.
- 06For Receivables and Payables, confirm the transactions are still open. Settled ones are no longer revalued — their difference became realised, not unrealised.
- 07Confirm the account is still active and the period still open.
After fixing the cause
Ticking the account is not retrospective. Any revaluation already run without it has to be redone for the affected periods, and the old revaluation journal reversed first so nothing is counted twice.
- 01Note which periods are affected, and the amount for each.
- 02Reverse or delete the old revaluation journal in those periods.
- 03Re-run the revaluation, then compare the result against a manual calculation.
- 04If a period is locked and must stay locked, agree with finance to correct it in the current period with an explanation.
Difference = FX balance x (Closing rate - Recorded rate)
Example: a USD 10,000 receivable recorded at a rate of 15,800,
with a period-end rate of 16,100
10,000 x (16,100 - 15,800) = IDR 3,000,000
Debit Accounts Receivable 3,000,000
Credit Unrealized Gain/Loss 3,000,000That simple calculation is worth doing whenever a revaluation looks odd. If NetSuite's figure differs from the hand calculation, the cause is almost always the rate used — check which rate was recorded on the original transaction, not the one you assume was applied.