US Dollar/Cordoba Conversions

Submitted by fyl on Sun, 2010/02/21 - 06:28.

Converting between US dollars and Cordobas in Nicaragua is about as easy as finding someone who eats Gallo Pinto. All the banks have current exchange rates for buying and selling posted and most have Euro rates as well. Coyotes (money changers) exist in most towns of any size. Stores accept either and paying in dollars but getting change in cordobas is relatively common. Depositing checks in US dollars in a dollar account and withdrawing in cordobas works fine. But, I have discovered a strange catch.

CoolTop has a US dollar bank account in BANPRO and a Cordoba account in BANCENTRO. Out bookkeeper needed to transfer money from the dollar account to the Cordoba account so she wrote a check made out to the company. Nope. Wrong. She could not deposit the US dollar check in the Cordoba account.

Now, if the check was in the name of her dog (and her dog had a cédula and a bank account, her dog could go to BANCENTRO and convert/deposit. Or, her dog could go to BANPRO, cash the check and get the money in Cordobas.

So, I have a question.. The obvious question. OK, two questions.

How does one do the desired transaction without walking around town with a brown paper bag full of cash?

In the name of good accounting practices, how do you avoid having checks made out to bogus people (or dogs) when the transaction is just internal to the company?

related...

Submitted by nicanor on Sun, 2010/02/21 - 11:40.

I have my account in BAC, by experience i can say is the best attention you can get in a standard US alike. Before i had one in BANCENTRO, but they don't have enough ATM and they don't provide with dollars withdrawal, and lines are very longer that BAC.

For changed dollars i can say deposit money from dollars to cordobas is not good idea because you loose the bank commission in the dollar exchange.

I learn that withdrawing dollars and changing with coyotes you gain a little bit. And for using in your daily expenses, you can use in PALI supermarket, they give the high rate of change (even higher than coyotes), so i use it to buy and pay in few transactions with $100 bills when i need a lot of cash or making my shopping in less denominations bills when i need. The same happen in BOMBAZO stores , where i buy different products.

First of all, they don't use

Submitted by charliedawson on Sun, 2010/02/21 - 10:53.

First of all, they don't use brown paper bags here. It's more likely to be black or light blue plastic.

So let me ask you a question. I can understand having a dollar account and a separate cordoba account, but why are you using two separate banks? You end up using both banks anyway, so it's not like you are escaping from one you don't like. This is a business account, so treat it like it's business. If both accounts were the same bank, you might even get them to let you make electronic transfers.

Brown paper bags

Submitted by fyl on Sun, 2010/02/21 - 11:13.

In Estelí, at least in BDF and BANPRO they do use brown paper bags. The only place I have seen brown paper bags used so, if someone is walking down the street with one, it is money. Not a good thing.

The BANPRO dollar account is old. It was the right place at the time, based on a few considerations (like they used to have a manager who did a great job). The BANCENTRO choice was partly because that is where our bookkeeper deals for other reasons, partly because they are, well, more competent for lack of a nastier choice of words.

The dollar account is seldom used. It is just where investment cash has been stored. As everything for La Renta has to be in cordobas, any transactions would have to be converted to cordobas on paper so it is just easier to do everything in cordobas.

So, that gets us to the two banks issue. That boils down to a broken on-line interface. The BANPRO site works fine in "normal" web browsers which pretty much means Firefox. BANCENTRO didn't and probably still doesn't. The last time I attempted to use it and it puked, I run the W3C compatibility test and, on the front page, I got 83 errors. So, it shouldn't work. My assumption is that it does work in Internet Exploder which is available on some systems but, of course, not Linux.