What is Ledger Conversion?
Ledger Conversion (LCN) transfers ledger, archive and budget transactions from an existing, source business unit to another new, target business unit. It allows you to generate additional currency values, swap existing currency values and/or change the pivot currency in the target business unit.
Ledger Conversion copies or converts all of the transactions in the source business unit according to conversion rules you specify. It does not create or modify any of the static data in either business unit. This means the static data must exist in the target business unit before you use Ledger Conversion. You need to create and set up the new business unit, and define the static data.
The Ledger Conversion Alternatives
Ledger Conversion allows you to swap or generate currency values, and/or change the pivot currency. This means there are three separate conversion scenarios available:
- swap or generate values without changing the pivot
- swap or generate values and change the pivot
- only change the pivot currency, without changing the use of the value fields.
Generating Values
Ledger Conversion can generate new values in the target business unit by applying a conversion rate to the chosen value on each transaction in the source database. For example, you could create euro values as Value 3 by applying a rate to the base currency values.
Memo values cannot be generated, they can only be established using a swap.
To maintain the financial integrity of the target business unit, Ledger Conversion ensures the generated transactions balance and generates any balancing transactions required. This balancing can be carried out in the target business unit, at one of three different levels: By Total, By Year, and By Period. The balancing transactions can be generated as permanent or provisional postings, depending on the ledger settings.
Swapping Values
Ledger Conversion allows you to swap values from one value position in the source business unit to another value position in the target business unit. For example, you might swap EUR values from Value 1 in the source business unit to Value 3 in the target database.
The following rules apply to the type of swaps you can perform:
- Value 1 can be swapped freely to Value 3 or the memo value
- Value 2 can be swapped to Value 1 or Value 3, providing the Value 2 source amounts are all held in the same currency
- Value 2 can be swapped freely to the memo value
- Value 3 can be swapped freely to Value 1 and the memo value
- Value 1 or Value 3 can only be swapped to Value 2 if you are not using the Fixed Assets module because assets use Value 2 in a different way to Financials accounts, see Fixed Asset Multi-Currency Processing
- memo values can only be swapped to Value 4.
The Ledger Conversion Reports
Ledger Conversion produces up to three reports:
- an error report, showing either instances where a required conversion rate is missing, or exceptions such as a missing account code, accounts or assets not open for posting certain values, or other detected errors. When at least one error is reported, the other two reports are not produced.
- a transaction listing of the source business unit transactions.
- a transaction listing of the resulting target business unit transactions.
Ledger Conversion is a powerful utility that can potentially generate and post a large number of transactions. Therefore, a Validate Only option is provided that checks the Ledger Conversion processing. This option produces the error report but does not generate or post transactions to the target business unit.
Once errors have been resolved, you can run Ledger Conversion again to perform the conversions and generate the target business unit transactions.