Oracle® Business Intelligence Applications Installation and Configuration Guide > Configuring Common Components of the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse >

About Document, Local, and Global Currencies


Currency lookups are required because your business may have transactions involving multiple currencies. To create a meaningful report, you have to use a common currency. The Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse provides a means for converting a variety of currencies, as well as prepackaging the following three currency types for each amount stored in the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse:

  • Document currency. The currency of the transaction. For example, if you purchase a chair from a supplier in Mexico, the document currency is probably the Mexican peso.
  • Local currency. The currency in which the financial books, including the transaction, are closed. For example, if your business organization is located in France and orders a part from a supplier in Britain, it may pay in British pounds, but it closes its books in French francs. In this case the local currency for the transaction is French francs and the document currency for the transaction is British pounds. The local currency is useful when each business unit of the enterprise creates its own internal reports. For example, your Japanese site may produce internal reports using Japanese yen, while your United States site may produce internal reports using United States dollars.
  • Global currencies. Out of the box, Oracle BI Applications provides three global currencies, which are the standard currencies used by your entire enterprise. For example, if a multinational enterprise has its headquarters in the United States, its group currency is probably U.S. dollars. The global currency is useful when creating enterprise-wide reports. For example, a user might want to view enterprise-wide data in other currencies

For every monetary amount extracted from the source, the load mapping loads the document and local amounts into the target table. It also loads the exchange rates required to convert the document amount into each of the three global currencies. In the target table, there will be two amount columns, and three exchange rate columns.

In most cases, the source system provides the document currency amount. This is the most common situation, and thus is the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse's default for handling currency. If the source system provides only the document currency amount, the Source Adapter performs lookups to identify the local and global currency codes based on the source system. Based on the source system the appropriate currencies are assigned. After the lookups occur, the extract mapping provides the load mapping with the document currency amount and the document and local currency codes. The load mapping will then use the provided local currency codes and perform currency conversion to derive the local amount. The load mapping will also fetch the global currencies setup from DAC parameters and look up the corresponding exchange rates to each of the three global currencies.

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