Solved: Exchange rates wrong in Salesforce Customisable Forecasts

Solved: Exchange rates wrong in Salesforce Customisable Forecasts

I came across an interesting Salesforce issue for a customer recently regarding their currency conversions.

The customer had recently implemented Advanced Currency Management in Salesforce but they were finding that forecasts no longer matched their Opportunity Currency Amounts.

This post is a short write up of the fix and a heads up to anyone who experiences this in future.



Advanced Currency Management

Salesforce ships out of the box with a single type of currency management. 

There is a single table with exchange rates that you set up. Then, all conversions are taken from the rates in that table.

This is really straightforward to set up by has a couple of issues:
  • You have to remember to update the table regularly
  • Changing a conversion rate affects all past, present, and future calculations
Salesforce realised that customers may wish to only change current rates, whilst preserving the historical and delivered Advanced Currency Management.

In a nutshell, this gives the Salesforce Admin the option to set date ranges for Currency Conversion. If an Opportunity close date falls in one of those date ranges, the specified rate for that time is applied.

Exchange Rates

You can check whether you are currently using Advanced Currency by going to:

Setup > Currency

If you see an option to Enable Advanced Currency Management you are not currently using it. Enabling it is a single click.

Currency management of Salesforce

To specify the currencies and their rates, click on New or Edit Rates as appropriate and set your company-wide exchange rates.

Reviewing the currencies in Salesforce
Changing these rates is instant and will immediately apply to any new Forecasts that you run.
Editing the conversion rates in Salesforce


So, what was the problem?

So, my customer had implemented dated exchange rates and everything was correct on that table but they found that their forecasts were showing a totally different conversion.

The problem? Customisable Forecasts do not reference the Advanced Currency Management dated exchange rates, they also refer to the standard system-wide conversion rate.

So, to keep forward-looking Forecasts correct and historical Opportunities at the rate that applied at the time of sale you would need to:
  • Enter the rates in the dated table to affect the close date of the Opportunity
  • Remember to regularly update the main currency table
This is not ideal but there is an open Salesforce Idea to have Forecasts reference dated exchange rates - go vote for it!

Customisable Forecast information
https://resources.docs.salesforce.com/204/latest/en-us/sfdc/pdf/salesforce_forecastsetup_cheatsheet.pdf

Dated Exchange Rates
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=administration_about_advanced_currency_management.htm&type=0

Conclusion

Vote for this idea for Salesforce to change customizable forecasts so that they refer to the dated exchange rate table.

https://success.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=08730000000YMXIAA4


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