SAP Business One International Interface or How to Open your Accounting to Chinese Users

Initially this small and mid-market accounting package with MRP, ERP and CRM elements was intended to serve international Small Business ERP market. If you deploy SAP in your headquarters in the United States or Europe and would like to find accounting solution from the same vendor for rolling out in small international facilities we do recommend you to look at SAP B1. It is localized in the sense of language, tax code and government reporting support in the majority of regions including China, Russia, Brazil, Korea and Japan. We would like to review general recommendations in this small paper:

1. Version 8.81 and SQL Server hosting. With its release in April of 2011 the need in hosting international companies in two SQL Servers with A and B editions ended. Version 8.8X supports all the languages on the same server and installation instance. If you are building or transforming Corporate ERP application for the multinational company we recommend you to consider approach where you are hosting SB1 on the central server in the USA with Citrix based connection for the international offices. This method saves IT infrastructure support and what is probably more important allows your headquarter exercise tight control over foreign facilities budgets and P&L

2. Switching user interface to Chinese or Russian. It is very easy and you do not have to even log off the application. Follow this path: Administration -> System Initialization -> General Settings and here click on Display tab. The language selection drop down list is on the top left position. Be sure that you counted the position of each menu following step as it might be a puzzle to switch back from Chinese to English

3. Challenge of running Accounting in such world and region powers as China, Brazil or Russian Federation. GAAP might be respected however local legislation often takes preference and your accounting system should be able to generate various reports to be submitted to provincial, state and federal governments. If you are just entering international market and do not believe in these challenges please think about such US regulations as 1099, W2 or W4. Foreign countries enjoy independence and they are designing their own way to control contractor annual revenue or payroll taxes. SAP is doing wonderful job by covering all these issues in the foreign countries and obviously domestically here in the USA and Canada

4. Spoke and Hub approach in Corporate ERP implementation. You do not have to stick to the same accounting package in all the countries where your multinational company has its offices. Let’s speculate for a minute. If you have Microsoft Dynamics GP as your hub accounting in the United States and it does the job it might be not generally a good idea to force Great Plains implementation in your foreign subsidiaries in China, Brazil or Russia. GP is only localized in USA, Canada, several English speaking countries and in Spanish speaking Latin America. Consider keeping GP as Corporate ERP in the USA and implement SAP BO in the foreign subsidiaries to release the responsibility for foreign countries tax and federal reporting and audit

5. Consolidated Financial Reporting. Popular tools are FRx and its successor Microsoft Management Reporter. Both instruments are ready to integrate your foreign subsidiary in the form of GL Trial Balance export to Excel worksheet. SB1 exports every report of query to Excel and it is reasonably simple to produce consolidated Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss and Statement of Cash Flow for the whole group in FRx. Another method we recommend is GL level consolidation over night or on the regular basis

6. GL Consolidation. Here you are creating shadow GL transactions only company in your centralized Corporate ERP system. In SAP Business One International server you are creating SQL job exporting records from OJDT table for the period. If you have Dynamics GP in the headquarters the good idea is overnight integration via Integration Manager. At this point you should be ready to deploy FRx or Microsoft Management Reporter

7. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representatives pick up the phone in Naperville and St. Joseph, MI call center). help@efaru.com. We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese. One of our experiences is international Corporate ERP and Consolidated Financial reporting

Andrew Karasev is Great Plains Certified Master, MVP, help@efaru.com 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904. He is also the initiator of eFaru project http://www.efaru.com and founder of Alba Spectrum information space