It is a very common requirement in any business which deal with sales and purchase in different
currencies to have proper exchange rates to determine the local currency amount with respect to
different foreign currencies they deal with. SAP has provided an option to maintain the exchange
rates (T-code OB08) for different exchange rate types for different purposes.
E.g.: Rate type M is used for monthly average rates
Eg: As per legal requirements in some countries, they need daily exchange rates for booking day to
day transactions. So, to overwrite standard rate type M,
we can assign custom exchange rate types.
2. When the rate between two currencies is too huge, we use translation ratio and maintain the rate.
This is to simply the exchange rate calculation.
Eg: Rate between USD and HUF is too high. So we maintain USD:HUF ratio as 1:100
Exchange rates are maintained through t-code OB08 and are stored in table TCURR. It is very
important to lock the table entries during exchange rate maintenance as per basic database design
principles to avoid any data record access during update. This design causes many issues specially
during month end where many users of different countries try to update same table and gets locking
error. More over, if the rate maintenance is an automated process say through IDOCs, if someone
already keep OB08 open and exchange rate IDOC is processed, it fails due to lock issue.
Exchange rate work list concept can be effectively used here to lock only required entries during
exchange rate maintenance.
SPRO path to configure Exchange rate work list.
Go to Define Work list for Exchange rate entry and create a new entry with proper name,
description. Select maintenance interval as per business requirement like daily, weekly, monthly,
quarterly etc. This is just an indicator of validity of latest exchange rate. System dont do any cross
validation with this date which using the rate. It simply uses latest available rate.
Enter Tolerance percentage if required. If a value is entered here, system does a comparison with
previous available exchange rate and through error if new rate is beyond the tolerance limits.