Consolidating in another currency

Question

Our main entity hierarchy has base entities in a number of currencies, but all parents are USD. We have a need to translate and consolidate the same base data using the prior year's currency rates.
The translation of base entities at the new rate is working fine, with the data stored in Value member "USDPY" instead of "USD". I was hoping that if I set a grid POV to value member "USDPY" HFM would consolidate the data into value member "USDPY" using the new rates. Instead, it consolidates the parents at the "USD" rate.
We are aware that we could have an alternative hierarchy with all new parents having a parent currency of "USDPY", but we hate the idea of creating all of the new entities. It would be especially troublesome in writing reports or Smartview queries with columns for "USD" and "USDPY" with entities as the rows; each of the columns would have different parent entities for the rows.
Is there any way to make this work with the original pattern and parent entities?

Answer 1

Two options to do this would be: 1) Use an alternate scenario or 2) Use a custom dimension. You'd need a scenario (or custom member) for each alternate rate you want to use i.e. Prior Year. In option one you can write rules to copy data from your Actual (or Budget) scenario into your Act_at_Prior scenario. In option two, you'll need some additional rules to do the calc into the new base member. The driving factor of which option to use would be timing/availability of the data. In addition, if this is just a once a year or one off request, you could make a copy of the app, use it for the reports, then delete it.