2 posts tagged with "multi-currency"

Most accounting systems that want to show derived figures—variance against budget, percentage execution, a consolidated multi-currency total—end up solving the problem the same way: periodic batch jobs that write synthetic entries to hold the computed values, or reporting scripts that reconstruct the computation at query time outside the ledger.

Both approaches have the same flaw. The derived figures live in a different place than the authoritative entries. They get stale. They diverge. Reconciling them back to source is always someone's problem.

MGL solves this with virtual layers. A virtual layer carries a formula instead of entries. Its balance is computed on the fly from physical layers—always derived from the same source of truth, always accurate to the query date, with no batch job required.

One of the things that breaks down quickly in real-world accounting systems is currency.

Most ledger designs treat currency as an afterthought — a field on a transaction, a conversion applied at reporting time, a problem deferred to the spreadsheet team. MGL treats it differently. Exchange rates are a first-class part of the data model, imported automatically, stored with full history, and wired directly into the layer architecture so that multi-currency consolidation happens at query time, not at batch time.