8 Design and Build Currency Conversion Applications
Building an Essbase currency conversion application is one way you can translate financial data from one currency into another. This feature applies only to block storage (including hybrid mode) cubes, and is not applicable to ASO.
Currency conversion facilitates comparisons among countries and enables consolidation of financial data from locations that use different currencies.
For example, consider an organization that analyzes profitability data from the UK, reported in pounds, and from Japan, reported in yen. Comparing local currency profitability figures would be meaningless. To understand the relative contribution of each country, you must convert pounds into yen, yen into pounds, or both into another currency.
As another example, reporting total profitability for North America requires standardization of the local currency values that constitute the North America total. Assuming that the U.S., Mexico, and Canada consolidate into Total North America, the profitability total is meaningless if data is kept in local currencies. The Total North America sum is meaningful only if local currencies are converted to a common currency before consolidation.
Topics in this section refer to a sample currency application named Sample_Currency with two cubes, Interntl and Xchgrate. You can recreate these samples from the gallery in the Essbase file catalog, from a compressed Lifecycle Management (LCM) file. See Build Currency Conversion Applications and Perform Conversions for instructions.