User guide
HOW TO USE FX.EXPOSURE
A plain-English walk-through for busy finance people. The first half shows you the app screen by screen. The second half is the substance: what an exposure is, what a forward does, what a policy is for, and how to read evidence without kidding yourself.
Start here
YOUR FIRST 10 MINUTES
- 01
Try the free calculator. No account needed.
Open the calculator → - 02
Create your free account so your numbers save and follow you across devices.
Sign up → - 03
Add your first company and say how it is reported: On its own, Part of my group, or A client I manage.
Add a company → - 04
Describe your recurring currency flows once, about ten minutes, then press FINISH SETUP.
Describe your flows → - 05
You land on NOW with today’s position and your year filled in month by month.
Open NOW → - 05A
Press EDIT MY NUMBERS whenever a figure changes. One screen holds money coming in, money going out and the deals you have booked.
Open NOW → - 06
Open PLAN to see next year’s flows and write your policy with BUILD YOUR POLICY.
Open PLAN → - 07
Open PAST to see what the last year and the last five years did to those same flows.
Open PAST → - 08
Set one rate alert so the market tells you when your level arrives.
Set an alert →
Step 01
THE THREE TABS
The signed-in app is one screen with three tabs. Each answers a different question, and they all read the same numbers.
- 01
PLAN answers "what does next year look like, and what will we do about it". It shows your projected twelve months per currency, your written policy, and the three options to model on those volumes.
- 02
NOW answers "where do we stand today". Net exposure, how much is hedged, how much is at risk, your year month by month, your rate alerts, and the button + RECORD A DEAL.
- 03
PAST answers "what actually happened". The last twelve months on your own volumes, then the same flows replayed through the last five calendar years.
- 04
On a phone the three tabs sit in a bar at the bottom of the screen. On a laptop they sit under the header.
- 05
Two controls in the header apply everywhere: "Viewing" chooses whose numbers you see, and "In" chooses the currency everything is reported in.
TIP: PLAN, NOW and PAST are one story in order: what is coming, where you stand, what history did.
Step 02
THE COMPANY SWITCHER AND WHAT "EVERYTHING" MEANS
One account can hold as many companies as you need, and an accountant can hold a book of clients. The "Viewing" selector at the top decides whose numbers are on screen.
- 01
Each company is set up as On its own, Part of my group, or A client I manage. You choose this when you add it, and you can change it later in the wizard.
- 02
Companies marked Part of my group are consolidated: a dollar you receive in one and a dollar you pay in another cancel out, because that is genuinely your group position.
- 03
Clients are never combined with anything. They are separate books belonging to separate businesses, so netting them would be meaningless.
- 04
Choosing "Everything" adds up your own companies. If you also hold clients, PLAN and PAST ask you to pick one entity rather than showing a blended story, and NOW lists each entity on its own row.
- 05
Use "+ Add company or client" next to the selector, or Add company or client in the account menu, to add another one at any time.
TIP: Not sure between On its own and Part of my group? Pick Part of my group if the same set of accounts consolidates them. You can change it whenever you like.
Step 03
RECIPE: DESCRIBE YOUR FLOWS ONCE
The setup wizard is the fast way in. You tell it the shape of your year once and it writes the next twelve months for you.
- 01
Open /setup from "+ Add company or client", or from ADD YOUR FIRST COMPANY on an empty NOW.
- 02
Step 01 · Your business: choose an existing company or Add new, give it a name and a base currency (the currency it keeps its books in), then choose how it is reported and press ADD COMPANY.
- 03
Step 02 · Your flows: type each recurring flow, for example "US supplier payments", USD, paying out, 600,000 a year, monthly. The schedule preview shows exactly which months it will create.
- 04
Step 03 · Last year: optionally add last year’s numbers. We keep that as a saved lookback you can reopen later.
- 05
Step 04 · Next year: apply a growth percentage if next year will be bigger or smaller, then press FINISH SETUP.
- 06
You land back on NOW, already looking at the company you just set up. Anything you typed in by hand stays untouched, and a projected flow that already has a deal against it is kept, not replaced.
TIP: Estimates are fine. You are describing the shape of your year, not committing to invoices.
Step 03A
RECIPE: EDIT MY NUMBERS
Everything you can type in lives on one screen per company, called YOUR NUMBERS. Wherever you are in the app, the button that takes you there reads EDIT MY NUMBERS.
- 01
Press EDIT MY NUMBERS on NOW, on PLAN, inside a month in your year, or from a currency you have opened. You land on that company, with the same numbers you were just looking at.
- 02
The screen opens with your year at the top, then one list in three plain groups: money coming in, money going out, and deals I have booked.
- 03
Every row reads as a sentence. Tap a row to open it, change what you need, and press SAVE. The year at the top redraws straight away.
- 04
Repeating rows carry a cadence chip such as monthly. Editing one rebuilds only its own future months, and a month that already has a deal against it is left exactly as it is.
- 05
Press + ADD and choose a repeating amount, a one-off amount, or a deal you have booked. The new row opens in the right group ready to fill in.
- 06
The same rows appear under Next year’s flows on PLAN, so either place works and they can never drift apart.
TIP: Estimates belong here too. A rough figure in the right month is worth more than a precise figure you never enter.
Step 04
RECIPE: RECORD THE DEALS YOU BOOK
A deal is a spot or forward you actually booked with a bank or broker. Recording it is what makes the hedged and at risk figures mean anything.
- 01
On NOW press + RECORD A DEAL, or press EDIT MY NUMBERS and use + ADD, then A DEAL I HAVE BOOKED.
- 02
There are three things to fill in: the currency and how much of it you dealt, the rate, and the date it settles.
- 03
Enter the rate in either direction, for example GBP/USD 1.3386 or USD/GBP 0.7471, so use whichever your broker confirmation shows. The app warns you if a rate looks inverted.
- 04
Spot or forward is read from the date you gave, and shown as a chip you can change if you want the other one.
- 05
Once the currency and date are in, the app offers the exposure it thinks the deal covers, for example "Looks like it covers: US customer · $50,000 · 20 Jun". Press ACCEPT, PICK ANOTHER, or NONE. A deal with no link still counts towards your cover.
- 06
Notes and the trade date sit behind ADD A NOTE if you want them. Press SAVE and Hedged and At risk update straight away.
TIP: Record the deal the day you book it. A coverage figure that lags reality is worse than no coverage figure.
Step 05
WHAT AN EXPOSURE ACTUALLY IS
This is the idea everything else rests on, and it is simpler than the jargon suggests.
An exposure is a future amount of money in a currency that is not the one you keep your books in. A euro invoice you will pay in ninety days is an exposure. A dollar receipt you expect every month is an exposure. Cash already sitting in a foreign account is not an exposure in this sense, because the conversion has already happened and the loss or gain is already yours.
What makes it an exposure is the gap between the day the price was agreed and the day the money moves. In that gap the rate can move, and the amount in your own currency changes even though nothing about the trade changed. That is the whole problem.
Two things decide how much it matters: how big the amount is relative to your margin, and how long the gap is. A large amount over a short window can be less dangerous than a modest amount you have quoted a year ahead.
Exposures come from two places in FX.Exposure. Booked exposures are ones you know about, an invoice with a date. Projected flows are the recurring pattern you described in setup, an expectation rather than a document. The app draws projected flows as outlined bars and lets you switch them off with the Projected flows control, so you can look at what is contractually committed today or at the year you expect.
TIP: If a currency amount is already agreed but not yet settled, it belongs in the app. That is the test.
Step 06
WHY VOLATILITY IS A BUDGET PROBLEM, NOT A TRADING OPPORTUNITY
Businesses lose money on currency far more often through planning failures than through bad market calls.
A currency pair moving three or four per cent over a quarter is ordinary. On a business running a ten per cent net margin, an unplanned three per cent move on a large share of costs takes a third of the profit on that work. Nothing went wrong operationally. The number simply arrived different from the one the price was built on.
That is why the useful question is not "where will the rate go". It is "what happens to my budget if it goes the wrong way by a normal amount, and can I live with that". FX.Exposure answers the second question, on your volumes, in your reporting currency.
The typical adverse move you see throughout the app is the middle of the range of adverse outcomes on the way that pair has actually behaved. As often as not the move is smaller. Roughly one time in four it is worse. It is a size, not a forecast, and no one here is predicting a direction.
The trading mindset asks how to win on the rate. The budget mindset asks how much of your margin is allowed to depend on the rate at all. The second is a question a board can answer and a policy can hold you to.
TIP: Compare the typical adverse move against your net margin on the same revenue. If it is a meaningful share of it, you have a budget exposure worth managing.
Step 07
FORWARDS AND MARKET ORDERS
A forward fixes a future rate. Market orders act only if a chosen rate is reached.
A forward fixes an exchange rate today for a payment or receipt on a future date. When the date arrives you exchange at the fixed rate whatever the market has done. It buys certainty, and the price of that certainty is that you no longer benefit if the rate improves. A forward is not a bet and it is not usually a cost in itself: the forward rate is the spot rate adjusted by forward points, which come from the interest rate gap between the two currencies, so it can sit above or below spot depending on the pair and the date.
Covering only part of the amount is called blending. You lock a share now and leave the rest to the rate on the day, so your final rate is the average of the two. It narrows the range of outcomes without closing it. Fifty per cent is a simple illustration because it removes half the swing either way.
A limit order names a better rate and a stop loss names a worst-acceptable rate. Both can execute automatically, including overnight. They can also be paired so one cancels the other (OCO).
A rate alert only nudges you when its level is reached. It never trades. The Market Orders guide explains the distinction, the pairing and a worked payment example in one place.
TIP: All rates in FX.Exposure are indicative mid-market. Your executable rate comes from a BLK.FX specialist and includes a small transparent margin confirmed at execution.
Step 08
WHAT A HEDGING POLICY IS FOR, AND WHO SIGNS IT
A policy is not paperwork. It is the decision you make once, calmly, so you are not making it every month under pressure.
A workable policy answers five things: what you are protecting (usually margin or the budget rate you priced on), how much of a committed exposure you will cover and within what range, how far ahead you will cover forecast flows, which instruments you will use, and who is allowed to deal and up to what size.
Ranges beat single numbers. "Cover eighty to a hundred per cent of committed exposures" survives a month where an invoice slips; "cover exactly ninety per cent" puts you in breach of your own policy for a rounding reason.
It is usually signed off by whoever owns the profit and loss it protects: the board, or the owner and the finance director in a smaller business. In many businesses, the person who executes the trades is not the only person who approves the rules. The point of the signature is that when the rate moves, the policy already decided, and nobody is improvising with the company’s margin.
Review it on a stated cadence, quarterly or annually, and whenever the business changes shape: a new supply country, a large new contract, a change of currency in your pricing.
PLAN writes the document from seven plain questions. Press BUILD YOUR POLICY, answer them, press BUILD MY POLICY, and you get a board-ready document you can view or DOWNLOAD PDF. A policy is saved either to one company or across the whole account, and every version you write collects in Saved policies.
TIP: A short policy that gets followed beats a thorough one that lives in a drawer. Start with cover ranges and approvals, and add detail at the first review.
Step 09
HOW TO READ THE EVIDENCE SCREENS
Three views, each showing something you can check rather than something we assert. None of them tells you what to do.
Your year, month by month on NOW is the picture of when money actually moves. One row per foreign currency, twelve columns for the next twelve months, bars above the line for money coming in and below for money going out, all on one shared scale so a tall bar really is a bigger month. Solid bars are booked exposures, outlined bars are projected flows. Read it for concentration: the month where a lot lands at once is where a normal market move does unusual damage.
The last twelve months on PAST replays what the market actually did across your own volumes. It shows the realised range per currency, the swing that produced in your reporting currency, and the three way outcome: locked on day one, a fifty per cent blend, or stayed open. It is arithmetic on published rates, not a simulation.
The five year view runs the same flows through 2021 to 2025 and states plainly how often each approach came out ahead. The useful reading is the spread between the best and worst year, not the average. Currencies the European Central Bank does not publish are named and excluded rather than estimated, and any year missing a month is dropped rather than filled in.
The honest limits. History is not a forecast, and the same flows in a different five years would tell a different story. The locked figures approximate a forward booked on day one, so real forward points would move them slightly. Rates are mid-market reference rates with no bank or broker margin. Above all, a year where staying open would have won is not evidence that staying open was the right decision: it is evidence that the outcome was uncertain, which is the thing hedging addresses.
The lesson these screens support is narrow and worth stating: hedging buys certainty, not winning. Locking fixes your number on day one. Staying open means living with the swing, whichever way it goes.
TIP: RUN THE DETAILED REPORT on PAST opens the fuller lookback, where you can name each flow, add the rate you actually achieved and export the whole thing as a PDF.
Step 09A
KEEP YOUR REPORTS AND POLICIES TOGETHER
Saved reports live at the bottom of PAST and saved policy versions live at the bottom of PLAN.
Use VIEW to reopen a saved item and DELETE when a version is no longer needed. Keeping earlier versions makes changes to assumptions and policy decisions visible over time.
Step 10
MODEL YOUR OPTIONS ON NEXT YEAR
The "What could you do?" block on PLAN prices three approaches on your projected twelve months. These are options to model, never recommendations.
- 01
KEEP IT OPEN values everything at today’s indicative rate and shows the range a typical adverse move would produce.
- 02
BLEND IT locks half and leaves half open, which narrows that range by roughly half.
- 03
LOCK IT IN values every movement at its own indicative forward for the month it lands in, so the range collapses to a single number.
- 04
All three bars share one scale, so the narrowing is something you can see rather than something you have to calculate.
- 05
Move the "Model a blend" slider between All open and All locked to price any split in between, and read what it does to both the level and the range.
- 06
MODEL A SINGLE PAYMENT takes you to the free calculator when you want to price one invoice rather than a whole year.
TIP: The right split is a conversation about your contracts and your margins, not an output of a model. A specialist will talk it through with you.
Step 11
SET RATE ALERTS
Tell the app what rate matters to you. It checks the market every fifteen minutes and emails you once when it gets there. Alerts need a free account, because we need a verified email address to send to.
- 01
Open Rate alerts from the account menu in the app, from the alerts card on NOW, or from the main navigation.
- 02
Pick FROM and TO, then type your TARGET RATE. As on a deal, you can enter the rate in either direction.
- 03
Open the advanced options to change the type (TARGET is a better rate to catch, PROTECTION warns you about a worse one) and the trigger (AT OR ABOVE, AT OR BELOW). The preview sentence spells out what you have set, so read it back before saving.
- 04
Press + ADD ALERT. Signed out, the button reads CONTINUE: CREATE FREE ACCOUNT instead: we hold the alert, take you to sign up, and activate it the moment your account exists.
- 05
Choose where alert emails go in Settings. By default we use your login email; add a notification email such as a shared finance inbox and every alert goes there instead.
TIP: An alert notifies you and nothing more. If you want the trade to happen the moment your rate hits, even overnight, BLK.FX can place a limit order or a stop loss instead.
Step 12
THE FREE CALCULATOR
The calculator stays public and needs no account. It is for pricing one set of payments quickly, rather than tracking a position over time.
- 01
Pick your reporting currency, then add each payment or receipt: paying out or receiving, the amount, the currency and when it settles. Paste a whole list from a spreadsheet if you have one.
- 02
Read your total exposure and the typical adverse move, which is roughly what a normal bad month could cost you before settlement.
- 03
Switch to the detailed view for the methodology, the budget rate comparison, and the PDF and CSV exports.
- 04
Scroll on to compare keeping it open, locking it in and blending, the same three options PLAN models on a whole year.
TIP: Calculator work stays in your browser on that device. Create a free account when you want it saved, tracked and shared across devices.
Step 13
YOUR WORKING RHYTHM
The app is only as good as the habit around it. Four habits keep it true, and none of them takes long.
- 01
Record every deal on the day you book it. Coverage is the one figure that goes stale silently.
- 02
Check NOW once a month, near your management accounts. Look at net exposure, at how much is at risk, and at the months where a lot lands at once.
- 03
Re-run setup whenever your flows change shape: a new supplier country, a contract won or lost, a change in volumes. The projected year is rewritten and anything you typed in by hand is left alone.
- 04
Review the policy on its stated cadence, and take PAST with you into that review as the evidence behind the discussion.
- 05
Before you commit to a rate, ask a specialist for a live executable rate. The app prices with indicative mid-market rates, which are the fair reference point rather than a tradable quote.
TIP: Put the monthly check in the same calendar slot as your management accounts. FX belongs with the numbers it affects.
Step 14
TALK TO A SPECIALIST
The app gives you the picture. When you are ready to trade, or you want a live executable rate, talk to a human.
- 01
Use WhatsApp for a quick live rate on a specific amount and date. A live executable rate is the exact rate you can trade at right now, valid for a few seconds.
- 02
Book a call to talk through a hedging plan, spread cover across several forward dates, or set up limit orders and stop losses.
TIP: There is no obligation. A quick WhatsApp exchange often saves an hour of second-guessing the market.
All rates shown in FX.Exposure are indicative mid-market (interbank) reference rates. They are not executable and do not constitute financial advice. Your executable rate with BLK.FX includes a small transparent margin confirmed at execution. FX services are provided by BLK.FX's regulated partners, all authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).