How to Submit Euro Only Expense Reports When Your Expenses Are in USD and EUR

You work for an international agency and regularly submit expense reports.

Some expenses are paid in US dollars, while others are paid directly in euros. No matter how they are paid, the final expense report must always be submitted in euros.

For each expense, you should be able to enter either a USD amount or a EUR amount. In the end, every expense should resolve to a value in euros that you can report back to your agency.

So how do you achieve this in Airtable?

Field setup

Start by creating three Number fields in your table.

The first field is called Amount USD. This is where you enter expenses paid in US dollars.

The second field is called Amount EUR. This is where you enter expenses that were already paid in euros.

The third field is called USD to EUR. This field will store the converted euro value of the USD amount.

At this stage, nothing is calculated yet. You are simply separating raw input from converted values.

Converting USD to EUR with an automation script

Exchange rates change over time, so hard coding a conversion rate inside a formula is usually not ideal.

Instead, you can use an Airtable automation with a Run a script action to handle the conversion.

Create an automation with the trigger set to When record is updated. In the fields to monitor for updates, add the Amount USD field.

This ensures that whenever the Amount USD field is updated, the automation automatically triggers.

For the action, choose Run a script. Inside the script, you call a currency exchange API, retrieve the current USD to EUR rate, and multiply it by the Amount USD value from the record.

The result of this calculation is then written back into the USD to EUR field.

Converting USD to EUR using Make

If you do not want to use scripting inside Airtable, there is another solid option.

You can use Make to handle the currency conversion instead.

Make provides a built in currency exchange module that can fetch up to date exchange rates without writing any code. In this setup, Airtable acts as both the source and the destination, while Make handles the conversion in between.

A typical flow works like this.

Airtable triggers the scenario when a record is created or when the Amount USD field is updated. Make then converts the USD amount into euros using the currency exchange module and writes the result back into the USD to EUR field in Airtable.

Functionally, both approaches produce the same result. The difference comes down to tradeoffs and personal preference.

If you are comfortable with JavaScript, using an Airtable script is often the cleaner option. Everything stays inside Airtable, there is no external scenario to manage, and the logic lives close to the data.

The downside is that you need to write and maintain the code yourself, and you usually need to pay for a currency exchange API.

If you do not want to write code, a no code tool like Make makes more sense. You can rely on its built in modules, visually map the fields, and handle the conversion without touching JavaScript.

Calculating the final amount in euros

The final step is straightforward.

Create a Formula field called Total EUR. This formula simply adds the two euro based values together.

The USD to EUR field plus the Amount EUR field.

That is it. This formula field always shows the final expense value in euros, ready to be reported to your agency.