Thursday, June 26, 2008

What is your functional currency?

by David Haimes (with excerpts from an internal document by Seamus Moran)

Regular readers will probably be used to this answer now... it depends.

In General Ledger 11i your functional currency referred to the currency of your set of books, it was one of your three Cs (Calendar, Currency and Chart of Accounts). In R12 we changed the terminlogy, there is no more set of books that is now renamed Ledger and the Currency of your Ledger is referred to as the Accounting Currency of the Ledger.

This is a subtle change and I'm sure experienced 11i practitioners are still using the term functional currency but you all need to stop because it's confusing people.

In Financial standards (IAS 21 and FAS 52), Functional Currency is a test for the integration of your overseas and home businesses. If the businesses share a Functional currency, they are integrated, and you must use a financial statement conversion method called "remeasurement". If the businesses do not share a Functional Currency, they are stand alone, and you must use a financial statement conversion method called "translation". To determine the Functional currency, there are a series of cash flow related tests: it is an objective, situational determination, and not an optional choice.

Now just because your auditors tell you that your functional currency is Euro, this does not mean that you need to go about the tricky business of changing your Ledger Accounting Currency (or Set of Books functional currency) to Euro. What it means is that you need to remeasure in Euro rather than translate.

To do this re measurement you can use

  1. The GL translation program

  2. A secondary Ledger

  3. A consolidation program such as Hyperion


It is not standard to have your Ledger Accounting currency different to you local currency, you will need to file local statutory reports in local currency, your bank will likely send you statements in local currency etc. so you really need your ledger operating in local currency to handle these easily.

So remember my Ledger Accounting Currency does not have to equal my functional currency.

4 comments:

Narayan said...

What setup books/operating unit do you assign for the following transaction?

You go to a US website(e.g. Amazon) and order something which gets shipped to Canada. If the item gets sourced from Canada warehouse, will the accounting be in Canadian Setup of books (assuming that each country has their own set of books)? In other words, will the billing address of your credit card really matter?

Also, does Oracle recommend to have bill_tos in multiple operating units?

David Haimes said...

Narayan,

Your description is mixing up the first party (amazon, the company deploying EBS) and the third party (you with your credit card and bill to address.

It is up to amazon (within the laws of the countries involved) to decide who sells you the item (Amazon US or amazon CA) and how they deal with moving any goods they need to source between their Legal Entities and hence how they account for it.

I could write a white paper on this... it's a complicated subject.

Amy said...

Can you clarify what you mean my remeasurement versus translation?

raveena said...

Thanks for the this good information.
Oracle Fusion Financials Online Training