SAP admits HANA Cloud makes for multicurrency messes SAP has admitted the cloudy cut of its S/4HANA service does not allow an organization to use currencies other than what a user's location suggests is appropriate. "Singapore law permits corporates and legal entities to change their reporting and local currency to USD instead of SGD," explains a Sunday post by SAP S/4HANA …
I sell a bit of software for a US company that bases its European operations in Bulgaria (long story). In Bulgaria, it's normal for a company to use Euro as a base currency even though it's not the national currency.
I'd have thought it would be the same for EU countries that have either opted out of the Euro or have not yet joined.
Surprised that this didn't come up at SAP before now.
Same in the UK. It is normal for companies to use Euros or US Dollars as their base currency. Perhaps the most well known example is HSBC which uses US Dollars as its base currency. There are more US Dollars transacted in the UK than in the USA, and more Euros transacted than in the whole of the rest of the world.
All required because someone, at the specification stage, wrote "local currency" when discussing currencies and everybody just went along with it.
After all, you're only setting up a cloudy thingy on a communications network that goes around the world, it's not like you should actually take into account any specific financial considerations, such as accounting departments in multinational corporations having to deal with multiple currencies, right ?
Right.
Aus is a "third party" to FX rates, which are traditionally referenced to EITHER NYC or London, except USD and GBP, which are referenced to AUD. Unless you are an international company, in which case your FX reports to the parent company have to reference AUD to USD or GBP.
I have sympathy for the report programmers. There are always some reports where it is bloody difficult to decide not only what the base currency is, but how the value of the third currency should be reported, and if the conversion rates are North-Side-Up or South-Side-Up.
Yes, in London, it is always number of foreign currency units per pound. The Eurozone does the same (number of foreign currency units per Euro), which means they report the GPB/EUR rate differently.
New York does it differently depending on the currency (sometimes number of dollars per foreign currency unit, sometimes the other way round), so GBP/USD and GBP/EUR are reported the same as in London and Frankfurt respectively.
Most of the time it is obvious which way round it is from whether or not the number is <1 or >1, but when you have EUR/CHF where both are about the same value, then you really have to check.
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