Retail chain, MENA

Context

A retail group operating across eight subsidiaries had run on a local functional currency for a decade. Accelerating inflation made management reporting increasingly noisy; the group’s board mandated a move to USD as the functional currency with full historical continuity for audit.

Challenge

Change the functional currency of every company while preserving historical records, open transactions, and reporting continuity. Odoo does not support in-place currency changes; the supported pattern is archive-and-rebuild per company, and the client had eight.

Approach

1. Legacy archive. Each of the eight existing companies was archived. Full historical access preserved; no new transactions allowed.
2. FX rate table published and signed off by finance before any monetary field was touched. Period-specific rates for historical P&L reconciliation; point-in-time rate for opening balance sheet.
3. New companies created in USD with matching structure, policies, and reference data.
4. Master data migration — customers, vendors, products, accounts, fiscal positions, pricelists — all denominated correctly in the target.
5. Monetary field conversion with documented rounding and precision rules. Each conversion logged.
6. Audit report — line-by-line, 340k+ items, signed off before cutover.
7. Cutover over a long weekend. Eight companies switched. Reconciliation passed at 0.00 variance.

Outcomes

• Management reporting immediately usable in USD.
• Audit trail intact from the legacy companies.
• Eight companies now in a single multi-company database (a consolidation we included in the engagement).
• The group’s auditor accepted the migration on first review.

What made this work

• FX rate table published and signed off before any conversion ran.
• Running the migration per company rather than for the whole group at once — smaller blast radius per pass.
• The audit report as a first-class deliverable from day one, not a last-week scramble.