The past three decades have brought continuous waves of economic disruption.

Even since the 2008 financial crisis, businesses have had to navigate Brexit, Covid-19, geopolitical conflict, inflation and ongoing uncertainty around trade and legislation. The previous decade of growth has given way to a new normal of volatility where the ability to adapt quickly is a competitive necessity.

For SAP customers, that adaptability starts in the ERP landscape. Large-scale transformation programmes may be harder to justify in uncertain times, but focused, high-impact projects are proving indispensable, delivering the resilience and agility that once came from broader initiatives.

Bulgaria’s upcoming adoption of the euro is a perfect example. When the Lev (BGN) is replaced by the Euro in January 2026, SAP customers operating in that market must tackle one of the most technically demanding changes: a national currency conversion within SAP. It’s a project that touches every layer of data and demands precision, speed, and absolute data integrity.

From an SAP perspective, the currency switch means handling everything from historical transactional data in BGN, through open balances, to future postings in EUR, all while preserving integrity, consistency and auditability.

In practice, an SAP customer has two options:

Local currency conversion: SAP provides tools that enable customers and partners to convert transactional and master data from BGN to EUR, including closed periods, so that once converted, the system “sees” the euro as though it has always been present.

New Euro company code: This route involves creating a new company code with EUR as the local currency for your Bulgarian business operations and migrating only the necessary master data and open items, depending on the data scope defined.

Each route has trade-offs in speed, cost and control. The conversion approach offers accelerated time-to-value and less business disruption but requires specific expertise in the Euro conversion tooling. This often means it needs a specialist data conversion partner(like, ahem, Xmateria). The new company route is more familiar to many customers but requires the closedown of BGN company code and the migration of relevant data to a new Euro company which is disruptive for the business. This is especially true in scenarios where the legal entities in question serve as partners in cross-company processes and are highly integrated with interfacing environments.

I spoke to Clemens Leider, our Transformation Advisory Lead - who spent over two decades working on landscape optimisation and transformation for SAP - about how customers should assess these routes, the risks he has seen in real migrations and how to blend agility with robustness in their currency conversion strategy.

Clemens’s view on Currency Conversion

A currency conversion, revaluation or devaluation is first and foremost a political or economic decision. This often comes in conjunction with regulatory and legal requirements and regulations, sometimes expected, but usually completely unexpected and suddenly coming up after long negotiations and postponements, often with only a short lead time for the businesses to prepare.

Based on many years of advising SAP customers, I’ve seen one thing is certain: a currency conversion always comes at an inconvenient time and hardly ever fits into a release calendar that has been defined way before.

At the same time, a currency conversion is a legal requirement and therefore a top priority for IT and business leadership. It’s simply a must-comply.

Business processes, supply chains, reporting and cash management must be adapted. The first recommendation is to involve the specialist departments - especially the finance department, legal department and process owners, as well as auditors - early on. This helps to clarify the framework conditions, requirements for reporting, changes to business processes and the impact of a new currency.

This involves issues such as the disclosure of currencies in a dual currency phase on invoices, delivery notes and in reporting, procedures for currency hedging and cash management, dealing with rounding differences, transferring postings in the new currency to connected systems and interfaces, preparing and disclosing taxes and, finally, the P&L and balance sheet, which must add up – before and after the changeover.

In my experience, for many customers, the decision on which implementation path to take is a matter of weighing up the costs and benefits and, in most cases, the time pressure and the availability of resources. And also, of course, the impact on budgets which have usually been allotted way before the currency conversion project came into view.

Some customers will have already had a positive experience with rollouts of new companies. In this case, there are corresponding templates and procedures that can be pulled out of the drawer. A new company code is usually the option of choice for these customers.

We have often seen this in the smaller national subsidiaries of globally operating companies. We also see this in scenarios where the scope of master data and transactional data that needs to be recreated, extended or migrated is manageable; especially for anything that is considered “open” e.g. partially delivered purchase orders, open items in financial accounting, production orders, etc.

Full-system conversion is most appropriate in complex or highly regulated industries, or where transaction volumes and cross-year reporting make selective migration impractical.

For these customers, standardised local currency conversion with the SAP Euro conversion tools becomes more attractive. SAP provided corresponding solutions for SAP ERP for the introduction of the euro in Europe in 1999, which have since been used in many thousands of conversions to successfully convert the system to an ‘after go-live’ look.

Over time, consulting and implementation teams have also introduced new ways to minimise downtime and optimise runtime performance during these conversions. The original tools we redesigned for the state-of-the-art hardware and databases of their time, which were far smaller and less powerful than today’s systems.

What is common to both approaches, and not to be underestimated, is that they always involve a corresponding project: they entail all the normal phases of a project, the test cycles, and a “big bang” go-live with downtime.

These stages all need to be carefully organised and managed, with attention not just to the technical side but also to the human and communication aspects of such a project. Depending on the size and configuration of the production system, and the amount of data affected, there is then the discussion about a possible downtime and its duration - like for patch weekends or other maintenance windows in a calendar year.  

Final Thoughts from Clemens

With proper planning and good counselling from an experienced consulting partner, these topics can be covered well, and risks of failure can be mitigated, resulting in minimal business disruption.

One customer told us their trucks shipping beer couldn’t leave the factory if the system hadn't been converted by shift start. These projects have a real business impact.

With S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition, currency conversion becomes even more interesting. The Universal Journal and freely definable currencies eliminate many of the reconciliation complexities of classic ERP with its total tables and multi-table reconciliation.

SAP has also started launching proof-of-concept projects to give customers another conversion option beyond creating a new company code, which still remains the currently recommended approach.

Conclusion

In a time of ongoing economic change, preparing for currency conversion is about more than just meeting a legal requirement -it’s about ensuring stability and readiness. As Clemens and I have explored in this article, success comes from balancing precision with practicality: aligning finance, operations and IT to manage the transition smoothly. Whether you’re using SAP’s conversion tools or a more familiar “classic” migration route, careful planning, early collaboration, and experienced guidance make all the difference. For anyone approaching Bulgaria’s Euro adoption - or any future currency shift - this is a chance to strengthen systems, improve processes and build lasting resilience.

As a highly specialist SAP data migration partner, Xmateria can provide advice and implementation support for all phases of currency conversion projects regardless of the methodology and tools selected, thanks to our many years of experience with customers of all sizes and in scenarios of varying complexity. If you’re facing the challenge of a Euro conversion and would benefit from specialist advice, please get in touch.