Can you please add a feature that updates the opportunity Exchange Rate for each individual opportunity whenever the exchange rate is updated/changed in the system?
Here is our situation. We have a multi-national company. The CEO is based out of Spain making our base currency the Euro, but the bulk of the sales are done in the UK and US (British Pound and US Dollar). We also have an extremely long sales cycle - so we have opportunities that can be open for many months or even years. We update the system Exchange Rate at the end of each month based on current exchange rates. Unfortunately, the opportunity Exchange Rate does not update, which causes all of our reports to be wrong.
This issue starts when an opportunity is entered. The Exchange Rate is filled in with the current exchange rate automatically, and then it is locked in for that opportunity. The Exchange Rate does not change unless the Estimated Revenue field is changed or the opportunity is closed. This means that for each open opportunity/report about open opportunities, the CEO or anyone with a different currency than the one the opportunity was originally entered as will see the opportunity's value based on the exchange rate that was current when the opportunity was originally entered. So if the exchange rate was .62 US Dollars to Euros 15 months ago when the opportunity was entered, but now it is .89 US Dollars to Euros, management sees the opportunity�s Estimated Revenue with inflated amounts.
This problem is made even worse when our system, whose base currency is Euro, takes that Euro amount that it figured above and converts it back to US Dollars (using the current exchange rate � the rate that gets updated each month) so that the US can run reports and such. Now we have 2 currency exchanges using 2 different rates and end up with a completely different number.
This is a big problem. We have opportunities that have been opened in many different months. Having each of those opportunities with a different exchange rate and trying to run actual reports is impossible. Then adding in the issue that if someone has to run a report using a different currency from the base currency and it adds another layer of complication. The reporting becomes completely useless. Can you please add an update feature to the Exchange Rate?
Comments
Hi, I understand what you are saying, and either option seems to have big negatives. As far as we work, we really only update the currency once a month. So that part wouldn�t be a problem, but is it possible to maybe have a process on each opportunity so that we can change each particular opportunity separately?
Category: Account, Contact, Calendar and Activity Management
It would have to be some kind of option, as the performance implications could be huge. There are two real options here: 1) Force update a recalculation on all opportunity products on all open opportunities when the exchange rate changes (and then recalculate the Opportunity values too). And Quotes, Orders, (invoices?), custom records? Asynchronously seems to be the only realistic option here, using the mechanisms for rollup fields perhaps. Even then I would be concerned about performance. An org-wide setting for maximum frequency of recalculations might be needed here - if you update exchange rates on an hourly basis for the purposes of aligning invoice values, should you also recalculate thousands of Opportunity records every time? 2) Don't update the base_ values in the Opportunities, but render charts based on calculations performed on the fly using current exchange rates. This is pretty horrible. Imagine I have many thousands of Opportunities, in many different currencies. To build a chart and calculate this on the fly would mean that for each Opp in the returned data set you have to calculate a temporary current Base_ value from the usual revenue value, and the current exchange rate for the relevant currency. Then aggregate all of these (eg Sum them per month), then convert those back to the local user currency at current exchange rate. A big downside of trying to do this on the fly is that it won't work for filters - for example I want to see all Opps > $1,000,000 USD. A specific Opportunity could be in or out of that data set depending on the exchange rate used when it was last calculated. The forced recalculation approach might address this better. But then, should a record be included one day and excluded the next when *the record itself has not changed*?
Category: Account, Contact, Calendar and Activity Management
Thanks for posting this issue. I have also experienced this, seeing the issue exactly as you describe at one of my client sites. Microsoft should give us the option (a checkbox perhaps) to have the reports/charts automatically get adjusted according to the currency exchange rate. That way, you have both options.
Category: Account, Contact, Calendar and Activity Management