Posted by Barney Beal, Content Director, NetSuite

For many organizations, the potential of global expansion remains only that thanks to one significant hurdle, the limits of their software.

Too many businesses discover that expensive and lengthy software deployment or the functional limits of their financial software, notably a lack of multi-currency GL accounting hinder ambitious plans for global growth.

While simply calculating exchange rates might seem straightforward, the fluctuations in exchange rates over time can create additional gains or losses in the general ledger. Moreover, managing multi-currency GL accounting with spreadsheets, as many companies are forced to do, requires cumbersome, manual processes that introduce errors and leave financial data siloed across the organization. Certainly, it’s possible. Peter Selinger offers a detailed tutorial on multi-currency accounting here, a step he took after discovering that he didn’t have multi-currency support in his accounting software. But any business with global aspirations – and indeed, that should be nearly all companies, given the global economy we now operate in – needs software that can handle that requirement.

And with the fluid and constantly evolving regulations and tax laws, cloud solutions provide a clear advantage. Businesses running pure cloud software with regular updates can quickly and easily adapt and conform to new laws because their software is updated while they sleep. The European VAT change is a prime example.

With such systems in place, finance pros and their counterparts in IT can nod in agreement when asked if they can support expansion into new territories.

Of course, global businesses need more than just multi-currency GL capabilities in their accounting software. Software that supports multiple languages and can comply with myriad taxation and compliance rules while consolidating financials across subsidiaries and other business entities is increasingly becoming mandatory.

For example, Commvault, the leading provider of enterprise data management, protection and availability software, is managing 28 currencies in a single system, in 35 subsidiaries, 25 of them in Europe as well as Australia, Brazil, China, Japan and Singapore. It replaced about 12 packaged and homegrown legacy applications and seven in-house servers with a single instance of NetSuite OneWorld.

But it’s not just the multi-currency accounting functionality that’s important to global businesses like Commvault. They need to be able to deploy those systems quickly as they add new territories. That makes cloud-based architecture a key ingredient.

NetSuite recently announced the latest enhancements to its cloud-based OneWorld global financial software system support for NetSuite in more than 100 countries with configurable tax compliance, support for 20 languages and 190 currencies, andmulti-subsidiary management.

Learn more about the latest release in the press release.