Currency & FX conversion
Variables, if set to Currency format, have a Currency drop-down where you can explicitly choose the Currency (e.g. USD, JPY, GBP), which will set the currency prefix symbol (e.g. $ ¥ £) or wording (e.g. AUD).
The currency setting on variables is useful for two main reasons:
- Visual indication: Displaying clearly which currency each variable is in (in the variable icon, and in each cell)
- FX conversion: Converting data in different currencies to the variable-set currency (i.e. for multi-currency / multi-entity consolidation).
Exchange rate (FX) conversion
When data that has a currency set (see section below) is connected to a variable in a different currency, Causal will automatically convert all data-connected values to the variable-set-currency.
- e.g. if your variable is in AUD, but you connect data that is in USD, Causal will convert the USD data values to AUD
- e.g. if your data is in USD but you want to see how that converts to EUR, set the variable to EUR and Causal will convert USD to EUR
Data source currency settings
- For common data sources (like QBO and Xero) currency settings are automatically detected and set by Causal.
- For other data sources where Causal can’t auto-detect the currency (e.g. Google Sheets), currency can be manually set (but currency settings are completely off by default).
- When you create new variables from a data source with currency set, Causal will set the variable's format and currency appropriately
Note: Only the user that created the data source can update the currency settings.
What logic does Causal use to convert?
There are two different types of rates Causal uses, Average and Final. These are shown (and set if user-editable) in the data source preview.
- Average: the average FX rate during the period (month/week/day/etc, depending on the model granularity). This is the default for Profit & Loss data sources.
- Final: the final FX rate of the period. This is the default for Balance Sheet data sources.
For example, in a monthly model, the Average rate would be the average of the daily rates for the month, and the Final rate would be the rate on the last day of the month.
FAQ
Different ways to set up your consolidation models
There are many ways you can set up your consolidation in Causal.
You can either have no entity breakdown (in which case you'd drill-down to see detail at the entity level), or you can use categories to breakdown by entity (see below) which means you can easily visualise historics by entity, and forecast by entity too.
- Create a category called "Entity", and add a category item for each entity.
- Breakdown the variables by this Entity category, and connect data items from each entity to the relevant entity row.
Note: You can also have separate models for each entity, and then have a linked consolidation model that combines them together. Note however we don't recommend this, as (1) you won't be able to take advantage of our automatic FX conversion (unless you also connect the consolidated model to data from each entity), (2) adding extra entities would be manual (building an extra model, vs. simply adding an extra category item in the Entity category as per above).