Salesforce Basics – Manage Multiple Currencies

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

Set Your Salesforce Org’s Default Currency

To get you started you will need to determine the default currency of your Salesforce org. Salesforce pre-populates the default currency of your Salesforce org based on the address it’s associated with. However, if required, you can change the default currency to any other. As a guideline, you can use the currency of the country from which most of your Salesforce users are working. However, there may be legal, tax, or other implications that determine your default currency.

The default currency, also referred to as the Currency Locale, is part of your Company Profile from where you can update it if required.

This currency will now get automatically displayed on any Salesforce record that contains a currency field. This includes records such as Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, Cases, and others.

Activate Multiple Currencies

When it comes a time, the company you work for starts making sales to clients based in countries that use a different currency, you will need to add this currency to your Salesforce org. This will give your Salesforce users access to this currency in order to change it on their Opportunity records, or other types of records, when required.

However, before you can add additional currencies to your Salesforce, you need to activate the Multi Currency feature on the Company Profile.

Upon activation, you will find a new menu item in your Setup, the “Manage Currencies” item:

Let’s see this in action. You can follow along from your own Trailhead Playground or Developer Org. Simply click the gear icon ⚙️ in the upper right corner to jump into the Setup.

VIDEO TUTORIAL WALK-THROUGH SCRIPT

1. In the Setup menu, you’ll go to the Company Settings and select Company Information.
2. You’ll click Edit and go down to this checkbox Activate Multiple Currencies. However, before going ahead notice the warning that you can’t turn this back off. This is not so much a problem in newer orgs, but if you are using an older one, this may have a number of implications. This warning includes a link to these implications I’d recommend taking a look at. This includes impacts on your reporting, managing exchange rates and more. Feel free to keep this open but let’s return to the Activation page for now. 
3. Tick the checkbox and then Save.
4. Refresh your browser. And you will now be able to see a new category in the menu on the left “Manage Currencies”. From here you can add new Currencies and edit their exchange rates. We will talk about all things exchange rates in the next unit.

From here, you can now add as many currencies as your Salesforce org needs to use. You can also specify how currencies will be displayed on Salesforce records. AND! You can enable Advanced Currency Management to manage the ever-changing exchange rates.

Set User’s Personal Default Currency

As mentioned earlier, the default currency you determine on the Company Profile will apply to any Salesforce record across the entire Salesforce org.

However, some of your Salesforce users may not be so happy about the fact that they have to change the currency on their records from the default to the new currency, all the time. 😤

Since we want to keep Salesforce users happy and make their life easier, there’s a simple solution: You’ll need to change the currency setting on the user’s personal record, for example to EUR.

What happened? User records inherit the default currency specified on the company profile. This means, that whenever you create a new user they will automatically inherit the default currency. In case you change the default corporate currency later in life, existing user records will not be overwritten. Hence, they may need to be changed too if required.

Best practice tip: In order to avoid having to change every single user record, consider where most Users are based and make that the default setting.

Set Currency on Salesforce Records

Let’s do a tiny quiz, before you keep reading:

Question: A Salesforce user creates a new Opportunity record. What currency will be displayed to the User by default?

Choose 1 answer:

A) The default corporate currency

B) The user’s personal default currency

C) None. The user needs to select one.

Did you pick an answer? Then go ahead and find out if you are right.

Whenever a user creates a new record, such as an Opportunity record, that contains one or more currency fields, these fields will automatically display the user’s personal default currency. Therefore, answer B is correct. Keep in mind that this may be the same as the default corporate currency unless it had been changed to another currency like in the example above, where we changed it from AUD to EUR.

The user can now decide whether to keep the default or change it to any other currency you have made available in your Salesforce org.

Enable Parenthetical Currency Conversion

Say what? For reporting purposes, such as managing sales targets, it can help to see all Salesforce records in the same currency even if some records contain a different currency. The feature “Parenthetical Currency Conversion” allows users to see the converted currency amount when the currency of the record is different to the user’s personal default currency (a.k.a. the parent – hence parenthetical).

This feature is enabled by default but can be turned off if required.

Now go ahead and add a few currencies to your Trailhead Playground or Developer Org. Then create some Opportunity or other records and see what happens. Remember what you may need to do on your user record. 🤓

Let me know in the comments how this worked out for you. I’d love to know!

WHAT ELSE…

This video tutorial is part of our Complete Salesforce Certification Courses. They cover everything from Salesforce Basics to advanced Salesforce features and functionalities every Salesforce professional should know about.

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