Merchants frequently buy with one currency and sell using another. As online commerce is becoming more and more a global commerce, it’s not unusual to encounter merchants who are buying in multiple currencies, and selling in multiple currencies as well. From a business analytics viewpoint, it soon becomes rather complicated to figure out where the margins stand exactly. In particular, margins depend not only on the present currency conversion rates, but also on those that have been in place 6 months ago.

As part of our commerce analytics technology, we have recently introduced a new forex() function that is precisely aimed at taking into account historical currency conversion rates for almost 30 currencies - including all the major ones.

Lokad’s built-in dashboards have already been updated to take advantage of this function. Now, when Lokad carries out a gross-margin analysis for example, all the sales orders and purchase orders are converted into a single currency, applying the correct historical rates used at the time the transactions were made.