Ascent Finance Platform (AFP) New Functionality: Entity and Multi-Currency Processing

New Functionality

In order to support our customers who prefer to work in multiple currencies and provide the ability to track transactions by business entity, the Ascent Finance Platform (AFP) has been enhanced (as of version 1.xx) to support multi-currency and to provide continuity of processing for entities as defined by the Ascent Main package within AFP defined objects (Cash Entry, Applied Cash Receipt, Refund, Journal Entries, etc..).

Some examples of the new functionality that is provided by AFP in a multi-currency organization:

• AFP Journals report in the currency of the transaction being journaled.  
• Account currency totals (total outstanding balance, total unapplied payments, etc…) are automatically maintained in the account currency when the individual transaction lines (which may be in different currencies) are being aggregated for totals.
• Currencies constrain what previous transactions can be used in an AFP transaction.  For example, if an applied cash receipt is being credited to a Sales Invoice, only cash entries in the currency of the sales invoice can be used for the applied cash receipt.
• Org Exchange Rates (the conversion factor from the transaction or journal currency to the org currency) are maintained on AFP objects such as cash entry, applied cash receipt, refunds, etc... (This is in addition to the conversion rates maintained by Ascent Main, on its own objects).

New entity functionality provided by AFP to support entity processing in Ascent Main (when turned on by configuration):

• AFP journals can report their currency amounts in the currency assigned to the entity of the journaled transaction.  This occurs when the AFP custom setting “Use entity currency for journals” is turned on and entities are turned on in Ascent Main.
• AFP objects (payments, applied payments, refunds, etc)  will inherit the entity of the transaction it is being recorded against.   For example, if an a payment is being recorded against a Sales Order, the payment will receive its entity assignment automatically from the entity assigned to the sales order.

Accessing the New Feature

Multi-currency functionality is automatically enabled when multi-currency is detected as being turned on within the org.  In addition, the design of the AFP multi-currency support, assumes the following additional configuration:

• Assumes usage of Advanced multi-currency.  (Parenthetical multi-currency can be turned on, but is strongly not recommended, because of the potential of creating significant confusion in how Salesforce performs currency conversion versus the currency conversion being performed by Ascent Main and AFP).

AFP also assumes setup of dated exchange rates for each currency in use. This is necessary, because some journals have the potential to do currency conversion that reflect the conversion rate in effect on the date of the original transaction, not the current system date:

There are now two new fields, Org Exchange Rate and Transaction Date.   

Org Exchange Rate is the conversion rate to convert the currency amounts from EUR back to the org currency (USD).   This is done by dividing the currency amount by the Org Exchange Rate. e.g. EUR 11/ 1.1 (EUR/USD) = USD 10.00.

The Transaction Date is the date used to lookup the dated exchange rate from EUR to USD.  Transaction date, in this particular example, is the date the sales order line was packed.