SAP Business One Multinational Deployment Recommendations

However this might be something that doesn’t work in the foreign country.  Accounting applications are localized for each country or region.  Localization means compliance to business regulations including taxation as well as user interface in the language of the country.  Let’s just think about compliance here in the United States and internationally.  In US we have such compliance requirements as 1099, W2 and State Sales Taxes just to name a few.  In Brazil there is federal chart of accounts and AP, AR and GL electronic filing also known as SPED.  In Russia they have required standard chart of accounts as well as mandated GL transaction with instructions.  We already published several paper related to Brazilian specifics.  In this small publication we would like to concentrate on SAP Business One and how to use it in environment where each branch has to use its local user interface in the language of hosting country:

1. Which languages are supported at this time?  It would be fair to say that almost all regional languages except Arabic and Farsi.  Very good news for the company with the headquarters in United States that it covers all Americas and Caribbean and it is available in Spanish as well as in Brazilian Portuguese.  Here we see expansion to China and South East Asia.  You should be covered in this case as well as Chinese, Korean and Japanese are available

2. How language switch works?  If you are reading this document on Youtube or our company information portal then you should be able to watch video presentation.  For the rest of you please login Business One and follow the path: System Initialization -> General Settings then switch to Display tab and select the language.  Do we have to do it every time when we login?  Not really as default language could be associated with named user

3. Internal Audit in English.  Let’s assume that you have branch in Campinas or Sao Paulo Brazil.  This branch records ERP transactions in Brazilian Portuguese.  Internal auditors are typically hosted in the US headquarters and they are comfortable to navigate the system in American English.  All you need to do is instruct them how to switch language.  Good idea of course have GL Chart of Accounts standardized for all the branches with English abbreviated names sharing account description with foreign abbreviation

4. Server Hosting and Internal Control.  Being part of international ERP consulting community we have been watching how companies make mistakes in worldwide ERP deployment.  First of all be sure that you have standard chart of accounts which is to be used in each internationally located subsidiary.  Secondly you should consider hosting all the branches SQL databases and application servers on the same Windows/MS SQL Server here in the United States and expose it to international accounting users via Citrix or Microsoft Terminal Server.  User licenses should be also considered to be acquired here in the US or Canada where your central office is located.  Of course there are consulting firms out there in Brazil, Russia or China.  We recommend you to have general contractor here in US and these foreign consulting organizations should be subcontracted to implement part related to localization and they should not be given the direction to design chart of accounts for example

5. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904, help@efaru.com.  We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, Atlanta Georgia, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA and Canada nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed).  We are working on Brazilian ERP consulting market in Sao Paulo since 2004