Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Tim Quillin with Stephens, Inc., your line is open.
Earl Lewis
Good morning, Tim.
Tim Quillin -- Stephens, Inc.
Good morning. How are you?
Earl Lewis
Been better.
Tim Quillin -- Stephens, Inc.
I appreciate your honesty. Currency is a little bit hard to figure -- for me to figure out how to project the future. Can you just talk a little bit about the currency puts and takes, the impact you know both in top line and below the line especially, and how we should think about that in 2009?
Earl Lewis
Well, I guess the -- I think it was about $5 million on the top line in Thermography in Q4, I am sorry, $6.6 million in Thermography in Q4, Tim. And my experience with this is, I don’t remember it ever being quite so volatile as it has been in the last two or three months. So, if I really could forecast it, I probably wouldn't be doing this job. One of the things that we -- in our internal planning -- set a base and then do our budgets; but this year, we have introduced a new look at it, we are taking the budgets for all of our international operations and locking them in so we can compare them to their budget in their home currency as opposed to the variable rate that we're getting, which is just bouncing around everything on this. I do not know if that will help that much in terms of the end result; it will just allow us to make sure that the operations are performing as we expected them to do relative to their local currencies.
But clearly, there is more volatility here than there ever was in the past and it has caught us pretty hard. From memory, it reduced the backlog in the Government Systems business as well by a fairly significant amount, $12 million. So the actual quarter entry for Government Systems was significantly higher, but the currency effect on their backlog took the backlog down by $12 million I guess. I mean, this is just bouncing all over, Tim, and it affects lots of things. So I could give you a nice clear answer on that, I would be glad to do it. Luckily we have operations in Europe, so we are hedged a little bit naturally. We have cash in Europe and you see that appearing as a positive on our quarterly results, because that actually increased in value. I don't have a good answer for you, Tim.
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