If you are selling globally to enterprise buyers, then you might need to send quotations in any currency – not just your home country. This is either because of regulatory issues or because of your customers’ internal requirements. There are some countries that allow trade in two or more currencies- Singapore or Hong Kong for instance.
As a CRM, we need to enable two broad things:
- Actual quotation being made possible in multiple currencies.
- Reporting continuing to be done in a master currency- so that everyone still compares the same set of data.
It is obvious that there is currency conversion involved. 1 USD is ~ INR 70 today. So, you can’t have a master price list which is in USD and quote the same in INR. Unless you converted. Here again lies a catch.
Why currency conversion does not work in sending quotations in any currency
We have seen multiple currency implementations done by others and how they do it is simple; keep a master price list as before in your “master currency” as defined by the user and then ask him to define the conversion factor for each currency he wants to enable in addition.
Why does it not work? Because of the following reasons:
- Selling a product in different countries is not simply a matter of changing the price from one currency to another by the bank conversion rate. There are other markups/ markdowns dictated by market forces like competition, import duties and sales and marketing overheads. For example, a product which you retail for USD 1 in USA might be sold for INR 85 in India.
- Different products might have different conversion factors- depending on market forces. You might sell accessories and spares at a higher margin than main products or vice versa.
- These factors change frequently – sometimes quarterly.
The best way for sending quotations in any currency
We implement multi-currency quotes based on prices lists maintained in as many currencies you specify. These prices are independent of each other.
Every time there is a price change – in any currency, you need to upload a new price list replacing the previous one. And while making a quote, just select the currency in which the quote should go out.
What about sales reporting?
Sales reporting, forecasting and closed deals reports will continue to be done in the “master currency”. So, at the time of specifying the additional currencies, you need to specify the conversion factors.
So, conversion factors are still used after all! But, they are used for reporting- in one central currency. As it was always done.
A few more things we did for sales quotes
We added the ability to edit prices in the quotes. And, now you can add discounts, local tax rates. And as before, you can quote with tax or without- depending on what your local custom is.