In our company, we have set up three North American companies (2 in Canada and 1 in USA), two Central Region Companies (1 in Germany and 1 in UK), and two Eastern Region Companies (1 in China and 1 in Japan). As you can see from this list, they are all functioning under different home currencies. We have just finished the last of our installations and functionally speaking, they seem to be stabilized. The senior managers of the company are now looking to retrieve consolidated information about our business, both from a regional level and from a global level as well.

What are my options. I had thought about setting up consolidation companies with an export/import routine which would convert them to a common currency, but my thoughts are whether this will be too complex or not and should I try and use Crystal Reports to mock this setup? I believe that having a historical lookup-ability will be of benefit in our situation, so a reporting tool may not be an efficient way of managing this information.

Thoughts? Course of action? Share your experiences?
We are operating in a Baan IVc4 environment with all companies on one server, except for China (which has it's own server).

Hi,

The first thing I would like to know is how your company structure looks like.
Are these companies all set up as single logistic/single finance or, do you have a multi-logistic/single finance environment or a multi-logistic/multi-finance one?
What is your finance group company and what logistic companies are linked to this?
What is your reporting package: Hyperion, Crystal, other?

This will help answering your questions.

Regards,

Edwin

What you are describing is exactly what Hyperion is designed to do. I know of many multinationals that use this product for financial consolidation, reporting and analysis across the enterprise. In addition, you can map historic GL as well so that you can report on periods prior to Baan. I would check it out (but I am a tech guy -- not a finance specialist).

-- Jim

__________________
Jim VanderMey
VP of Technical Operations
Open Systems Technologies
Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
jvandermey@ostusa.com

The above postings are correct. Hyperion will serve as a consolidation tool. If you do not have it and do not want to buy it, or senior management wants very specific reporting then using your existing Crystal package will also be an option as it has all the Baan mappings in place.

I owuld suggest you check on exactly what reporting is being asked of you and then look at either of the choices.