The moment your company buys from a vendor in Canada or sells to a customer in Europe, your ERP has a new job: tracking two amounts for every transaction. The euros on the invoice, and the dollars in your general ledger. Get the exchange rates wrong — or let them go stale — and your financial statements quietly drift away from reality.
Both Dynamics GP and Dynamics 365 Business Central handle foreign currencies well. Round 32 of our GP vs. BC Functionality Face-Off looks at what it takes to set multicurrency up, keep the rates current, and revalue your balances at month end. The short version: GP asks you to build and maintain the machinery. BC asks you to pick a rate service and let it run.
How you do it in Dynamics GP
GP’s Multicurrency Management is a system-level setup, which means most of it happens outside your company, in windows shared by every company on the install. Microsoft’s setup checklist walks through five steps:
Set up each currency. In the Currency Setup window (Tools >> Setup >> System >> Currency), you create a currency ID, enter the ISO code, choose the symbol and how it displays, pick the negative sign style, set decimal and thousands separators, and even enter the terminology that prints on payables checks.
Grant company access — twice. Currencies live at the system level, so each company must be granted access in the Multicurrency Access Setup window. You’ll come back to this window again later, because exchange rate tables need their own access grants per company.
Build exchange rate tables. In the Exchange Table Setup window, you create a table for each currency relationship and decide its rate frequency (daily, weekly, monthly), the calculation method (multiply or divide), the transaction rate default, and how long rates stay valid before they expire. Many companies end up with several tables per currency — a buy rate, a sell rate, an average rate for reporting.
Key in the rates. Here’s the part your accounting team feels every week. GP has no built-in rate feed. Someone opens the Multicurrency Exchange Rate Maintenance window and types the new rates in by hand — every Monday morning, every month end, or however often your tables expire. Per Microsoft’s Multicurrency Management manual, rates entered there can be shared across companies, which helps — but a person still has to enter them.
Finish the financial setup. In each company, you set the functional currency in the Multicurrency Setup window (choose carefully — it can’t change once transactions post), define rate types, and assign the realized and unrealized gain/loss posting accounts.
At month end, revaluation runs from Financial >> Routines >> Revaluation — after you’ve marked the Revalue Account box on each account and selected its currencies in the Select Account Currencies window. You can print the report first, then post the unrealized gain or loss, with a reversal date if you want it to flip back.
How you do it in Business Central
BC keeps everything on one page — literally called Currencies.
Set up the currency codes. Microsoft’s currency setup guide recommends creating each code with its ISO code. The same row holds the rounding rules and the realized and unrealized gain/loss accounts, so the posting setup isn’t a separate project. Then you assign a default currency code to each foreign customer, vendor, and bank account — after that, users never pick a rate. They pick a customer, and the currency and current rate come along automatically.
Subscribe to the rates. This is the headline difference. BC includes a currency exchange rate service: point it at a rate provider’s feed, map the fields once, and turn it on. Pair it with a job queue entry and rates update themselves on a schedule — daily, hourly, whatever you choose. Nobody types a rate on Monday morning. If you prefer manual control, you can still enter rates by hand on the Currency Exchange Rates page.
Adjust and revalue. The Exchange Rates Adjustment batch job updates posted customer, vendor, and bank account entries to current rates and posts the unrealized gains or losses to the accounts you set on the Currencies page. For G/L accounts that carry foreign currency, the G/L Currency Revaluation action on the Chart of Accounts creates the adjustment entries in a journal for you to review and post — and the current version of the adjustment process even supports posting preview, so you can see the entries before anything hits the ledger.