We Need Your Feedback: Enhancing Currency Support in Wrike's Budgeting Features 💵

Hi Lisa,

Great that this missing feature is on the team's radar. Here are my replies to your questions:

1. How are you currently tracking project financials in different currencies?

We use Wrike both in Finland and Sweden. Both our Finnish and Swedish projects include task effort. We display the planned effort cost in table view as data for our managers, who set task effort corresponding to project budgets, and also track that time spent cost stays within budget. To calculate these costs, we need to calculate hours times user's cost rate. Due Wrike's current single currency limitation, we only display EUR, so Sweden has to work with EUR, although their local budgeting is in Swedish Krona (SEK). Wrike Professional Services developed custom Analyze reports for us, and in those reports Swedish project costs are displayed as SEK, converted from EUR using a set currency conversion rate.

2. What are the challenges you're facing with your current approach?

I know this is only marginally related to the single versus multiple currencies issue at hand, but nevertheless, we need to calculate planned cost and time spent cost from tasks/subtasks, which adds complexity to the current situation. Our projects are based on blueprints, where the phases are linked task-type Custom Item Types, which in turn contain tasks with effort and planned cost. We're able to turn on subitems calculations for Planned cost, but that works only on project level. We already asked Wrike Support (see ticket ID #1412764) last November if there's a way we could also add a "calculate planned cost from subitems" field to our Custom Item Type tasks/subtasks. Project managers need to be able to follow these planned cost versus time spent cost also on task/subtask level. Using project-type Custom Item Types might solve this problem, but we see too much value in being able to reschedule the entire project by keeping the subprojects linked that we need to keep these as task-type Custom Item Types. Support replied "[...] currently, automatic calculations for effort or financial fields are not available at the task level, only at the project level. Incorporating such a feature at the parent task level might potentially lead to difficulties with resource planning and budgeting. Consequently, there are no immediate plans to introduce this functionality". Support suggested a workaround, to duplicate the system field values, such as 'Time Spent' or 'Planned Cost', via a formula-type custom field, which would allow us to enable sum calculations at both project and task levels. However, that means we can't use the Job Role's Cost Rate setting for this, instead, we have to use a custom field containing the user's cost rate and copy-paste that to every single row in Table View. Here, we use the Finnish cost rate in EUR for Finnish projects, and the Swedish cost rate, converted to EUR for Swedish projects. We would like to be able to use the Job Role's Cost Rate setting here, obviously in both EUR and SEK, and be able to have automatic calculations for effort on task level. So in our case, multiple currencies and the unavailbility of automatic calculations on task level are intertwined into quite a mess of custom fields that need a lot of manual maintenance.

3. Can you describe situations in your workflow where the availability of multi-currency support would be particularly valuable?

Ideally, the Job Role's Cost Rate setting would allow for both SEK and EUR, and automatic calculations on task level were available. That would relieve us of the mess with maintaining multiple custom fields per task row in order to calculate planned cost and time spent cost from subitems.

4. How would you gauge the significance of not having this capability currently?

In our case, the significance of multiple currency support is depending on the availability of automatic calculations on task level. If we had both, we would be able to use the Job Role's Cost Rate setting in SEK or EUR, and use it to automate calculation of planned cost and time spent cost from subitems, and display the result in the company's local currency.

Appreciate your detailed answers Tuomo Suominen, thank you! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Checking in Lisa to see if there are any updates here? Our requirements are similar to Tuomo's. 

We manage projects across a minimum of four currencies. We are using a custom field to capture the project's currency, along with another custom field capturing the exchange rate. We then have custom calculations against budget and planned revenue. 
Cost and bill rates need to be calculated in project financials for each resource in the project, or we need to use custom calculated fields to capture planned and actual costs and fees correctly. When a resource is added, PM's often forget to go in and update their rates to reflect the exchange rate.
The ability to set the currency or exchange rate for an entire project would minimize a lot of the manipulation we're doing, and lend confidence to reporting.