Trade across multiple countries most likely means trade in multiple currencies and dealing with multiple regulatory bodies. This may lead to frustrating errors affecting both your utility and your customers.
To prevent these mistakes from happening, it is important that you can efficiently handle multiple companies, currencies, and countries of service. A modern Customer Information Solution (CIS) can assist you with this.
Streamlining global businesses –
5 ways a modern CIS can assist
1. Handle multiple legal entities
We live in a globalized economy where a company may have multiple legal entities. A modern CIS allows cross-company data sharing, which makes fluent communication between different entities easy. When you want your data to remain confidential for a specific subsidiary, you can limit access to the operating company in charge.
2. Handle multiple currencies
In a hyper-connected world, trade across multiple countries often entails navigating the complexities of different currencies. Your accounting currency might also differ from your reporting currency, which is a common scenario in multinational companies. A multi-currency functionality built into your CIS can provide the necessary support to overcome these challenges.
3. Incorporate exchange rates
You want to be able to incorporate the latest exchange rates into your prices to optimize your revenue streams and stay ahead of the competition. A modern CIS allows you to work with Exchange rate providers to achieve this.
4. Revalue your general ledger account balances
As part of your period-end, you may need to revalue your general ledger account balances in foreign currencies using different exchange rate types (current, historical, average, etc.).
For example, one accounting convention requires:
- assets and liabilities to be revalued at the current exchange rate,
- fixed assets at the historical exchange rate, and
- profit and loss accounts at the monthly average.
A general ledger foreign currency revaluation built into your CIS can be used to meet this requirement.
5. Ensure market compliance
To effectively handle incoming and outgoing market messages in the countries where you operate, it is crucial to have a market-compliant solution in place.
Market messages are consolidated within automated processes known as scenarios. In a modern CIS, the progression of various market scenarios and exceptions can be effortlessly monitored through a work management framework. Whenever minimal or no user intervention is required, the CIS will automatically process the scenario.
In cases where the scenario asks for user interaction, the user can:
- Look into the status (action) history of the scenario.
- Add or view industry information related to the scenario.
- Filter the scenario by the presence of certain scenario relations (e.g., all scenarios that are linked to a certain service, agreement, etc.), or values.
- Create his/her own advanced filter on certain values, to check how many values are open/received, or to check upon exceptions.
- Delete old data (this function should only be available to a select set of users with a specific security role).
