Knowledge
Native currency, reporting currency and the FX rates in between — how a multi-currency portfolio rolls up into a single view.
Last updated 4 July 2026
In brief: Portfolio companies are held in their own native currencies, but a fund reports in one currency. Rolling a multi-currency portfolio into a single view means translating every cap table and interest accrual at a consistent set of FX rates. Reporting currency is a fund-level concept — the same company can roll up into two funds that report in different currencies.
A portfolio company operates and is capitalised in its native currency — a UK business in GBP, a Nordic one in SEK, and so on. Its cap table, its preference share coupons and its shareholder loan balances are all naturally denominated in that currency.
A fund, however, has to present a single, comparable view across its whole portfolio. That means choosing a reporting currency — often EUR for a European fund — and translating each company's figures into it. The native currency is where the economics actually live; the reporting currency is the lens the fund and its LPs look through.
A common mistake is to treat reporting currency as a property of the portfolio company. It is not — it belongs to the fund. The same portfolio company can be held by more than one fund, and those funds may report in different currencies. A GBP-denominated company held by both a EUR-reporting fund and a USD-reporting fund must be translatable into either, from the same underlying native-currency record.
One record, many lenses. Storing each holding once in its native currency and translating on the way out — rather than baking a reporting currency into the data — is what lets the same company appear correctly in two funds with different reporting currencies.
Translation needs a consistent source of exchange rates. A practical approach is to hold daily FX rates against a single base currency — CapTab uses a EUR base — and derive any currency pair from those. To convert a value into the reporting currency:
Because the rates are dated, a cap table as at any historical date can be translated at the rate that applied on that date — essential for producing a year-end position that ties to the accounts, and consistent with how interest accruals are computed per period.
Balance-sheet items — the cap table position at a point in time — are usually translated at the spot rate on that date. Flow items measured over a period may instead use a period-average rate. Which to apply is an accounting-policy decision; the important thing is that the choice is applied consistently and that the rate used for any figure can be identified after the fact.
The risk in a multi-currency portfolio is inconsistency: different companies translated at rates pulled on different days, or a reporting-currency figure that cannot be traced back to a native amount and a rate. Holding native-currency transactions and a dated FX table in one place, and translating on demand, keeps every company on the same basis. That is how CapTab produces a cross-portfolio capital overview in a single reporting currency while preserving each holding's native-currency truth.