Mitigate the mess to mitigate the FX risk
ERP systems are designed to streamline business operations, but when it comes to FX risk management, many treasurers discover a frustrating truth post-implementation: their ERP doesn’t tell them what they need to know.
Despite a successful deployment, Treasury often ends up piecing together FX exposures manually – because ERP systems aren’t always configured with Treasury’s priorities in mind.
A typical ERP deployment checklist for Treasury
- Was Treasury involved early?
- Were gaps assessed and improvements identified?
- Were end-to-end tests performed?
- Is the ERP live with governance in place?
If the answer is yes to all of the above – you’re ahead of the curve. But even then, Treasury can find itself flying blind when it comes to FX exposures.
Why? Because Treasury’s needs often take a back seat to the priorities of:
- IT, who own system selection and configuration
- Accounting, with long-held practices that resist change
- Procurement and Sales, who may not understand FX implications
- Tax, focused on structuring, not exposure
- Cash Management teams prioritizing liquidity over risk visibility
The result? Treasury is left to solve an FX exposure puzzle with missing pieces.
What can Treasury do?
Even if you can’t redesign the ERP, you can work smarter with what you’ve got with these steps:
Ensure data consistency
- Are master data and legal entities managed consistently across ERP instances?
- Is there a common chart of accounts and FX rate source?
- Are functional currencies and remeasurement rules consistently applied?
Align process consistency
- Are FX rates loaded automatically and accurately?
- Are monetary accounts and revaluation jobs standardized?
- Are ghost balances and clearing accounts managed cleanly?
Be pragmatic
You may not be able to re-engineer your ERP, but you can understand its limits and work around them.
At AtlasFX, we help Treasury teams operate confidently – even in imperfect ERP environments – by delivering complete visibility into FX exposures using automation, smart data extraction, and risk-optimized workflows.
Need better FX exposure visibility despite ERP limitations? Book a discovery call with AtlasFX.
See related post: Top 5 FX Risk Management Challenges for SAP ERP Users