Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

AX 2009 Secondary currency vs AX 2012 Reporting currency

My customer runs AX 2009 in 31 countries (10 more are planned) and is considering upgrading to AX 2012.

He made customizations in order to produce financial reports in corporate currency that comply with IAS 21. Those customizations are related to the way AX manages exchange rate when performing settlement/unsettlement, reversing, foreign currency revaluation, fixed assets depreciation... Reason is the "Secondary currency" of AX 2009 is not designed to meet such requirements.

In AX 2012, "Secondary currency" is replaced by "Reporting currency" and Management Reporter is introduced.

MS provides 2 interesting sources about currency management:

- "Financial consolidations and currency translation", white paper, January 2014

- "IAS 21 – The Effects of Changes in Foreign Exchange Rates", PartnerSource, December 2013.

Beyond MS theory, I would like to know if anyone has implemented the AX 2012 reporting currency and which progress/issues/gaps have been identified.

We are a Dutch company with AX 2012 with around 50 administrations, of which 6 consolidation/elimination administrations.

All but 4 are USD administrations; the 4 are EUR administrations. Preferably I would have made the reporting currency USD for all administrations. However we need some EUR reports, like VAT and statistics. So, our consultant told us to have USD administrations with EUR reporting currency and EUR administrations with USD reporting currency. This way, there is always a EUR amount for the required EUR reports.

Disadvantage is that we can never sum e.g. all amounts of one ledger account of all administrations; we need first to swap the EUR and USD amounts of the EUR administrations.

Currency revaluation is working well for both primary and reporting currency. Neither do we have any problems with settlement/unsettlement, reversing, depreciation, etc. for reporting currencies.

In the consolidations AX 2012 translates the primary currency into the consolidation currency with the rate of the posting date (for P&L accounts). This can give some problems if you mess with the FX rate in your posting:

When you make a USD entry in a EUR company with FX rate 1 (manually changed), then USD amount = EUR amount. However, at that time the FX rate in the system is 1.3. In the consolidation the primary currency (EUR) is translated to the consolidation primary currency (USD). So, the EUR amount is multiplied by 1.3 to get a USD amount. However, the original transaction currency was USD, so the multiplication by 1.3 is wrong...

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