A question came in about converting metric values that are in currency formats.

Question:
We want to deploy PMF as a way of measuring many different types of metrics across various parts of our business across the globe. We have financial metrics that will be important to track at both a country currency level as well as at a higher level of aggregation of multiple countries. There are several challenges associated with this:

Some countries may want to report in both their base country currencies as well as, for example, British Pound Sterling. How do you show the same metric in 2 different countries? Do you have 2 KPI definitions, one per currency?

When you try and aggregate to a higher level you will have to have some logic to ensure that only the standard currency is used for aggregation and only the metric associated with that standard currency is available at the higher levels.

This means we need to apply a conversion from currency 1 to currency 2 at some point. Do we need to store the measure twice? Once as currency 1 and again as Currency 2? Is there a cleaner way?

Answer:
Quite simple in PMF.

1. All measures should be stored in a standard currency. Example: USD, Euro, etc. You will need to decide what the storage currency of record is going to be used, and stick to it consistently for all Measure Loads. Measures coming in from any another currency type will need to be converted to this currency of record during Measure Load. This is important to do because it allows aggregation of these monies at higher levels.

2. Then you need to create a conversion profile for each output - British Sterling, Brazilian Reals, etc. The user who wants to see a converted amount selects this profile in User Preferences on the Today tab. The user can make this a permanent choice, and it's made user-by-user, which allows your users from different countries to always see the values in their native currencies. Nice, huh? If you use USD or Euro as the standard currency then you need multiple labeled conversion profiles, one for each output.

Note that currency conversion rates change every minute of the day since these are traded on the open market. There is no way in PMF to constantly adapt to this (nor in any systems apart from those used by large banks to handle arbitrage). And that’s actually a good thing – otherwise the base amounts of the money you’re trying to measure would be changing minute to minute. Remember, PMF is not an accounting system or an arbitrage tool, but a way of measuring performance against targets. So, to prevent yourself going mad, it's recommended that you stick to an agreed on conversion rate for each currency. You could create new profiles on a quarterly basis if desired and label them as such. The profiles are stored with the PMF data mart and will automatically migrate to new releases.

Hope this helps.