If you've been holding off on adopting the new financials experience in Project Workspace or Strategic Planning Workspace because your organization runs projects across multiple countries—this one's for you.
The Problem We've All Been Working Around
For those of us managing portfolios in global organizations, the workaround has always been clunky. You're running a project out of London, but your instance's functional currency is USD. Your project managers are doing mental math (or worse, maintaining spreadsheets) to track what things actually cost in GBP while the system shows everything in dollars.
What's New in Q4 2025
Starting with the Q4 2025 release, you can now set an Investment Currency on your work items—demands, projects, epics, features, you name it.
Here's what that actually means in practice:
For Demand Managers: When you create a demand, you can specify both the investment currency for the demand itself and separately for whatever artifact it converts into (like a project). This flexibility matters because sometimes a demand is evaluated at HQ in USD, but the resulting project runs in EUR.
For Project Managers: Once your demand converts to a project, you get a currency toggle right in the financials view. Switch between functional and investment currency to see your cost plans, budgets, and actuals in whichever view makes sense for the conversation you're having.
For Portfolio Managers: You still get your consolidated view in functional currency for portfolio-level monitoring, while your project teams work in their local currencies.
How It Actually Works
The system uses the term "Investment Currency" consistently across all work item types. When you set this:
- Cost plan creation forms auto-populate the entered currency to your investment currency
- Budget entry works in investment currency using budget reference rates
- Actuals convert using the latest platform exchange rates
One important guardrail: once you've created any financial records (costs, budgets, benefits, actuals), you can't change the investment currency on that work item. Set it early.
Getting Started
If you're on SPM Standard: You'll need the Portfolio Planning and Project Workspace plugins active.
If you're on SPM Professional: You'll need Strategic Planning and Project Workspace.
For existing customers with multi-currency data: There's an upgrade job called "update multi-currency fields to investment currency for existing demands and projects" that migrates your existing demand/project currency data to the new investment currency fields.
Run this before expecting your historical data to show up correctly.
What's Not Included (Yet)
I want to be upfront about current limitations:
- Portfolio-level rollups in investment currency: The portfolio financials view still works in functional currency only. Multi-currency aggregation at the portfolio layer isn't part of this release.
- Baseline creation and comparison in investment currency, migration of financial baselines from project currency to investment currency: The following capabilities will be released in q1 2026 release -
- Ability to create financial baseline that capture data in investment currency.
- Ability to migrate financial baselines that had values in project currency.
- Investment currency for cost plans associated to project tasks instead of projects: If you have projects with cost plans associated with project tasks instead of directly to projects, investment currency rollups do not work yet. Please wait for Q1 2026 release before upgrading to the new multi-currency plugin.
Configuration Options
Your existing demand currency setup carries over. The system property behavior you've configured—whether demands default to functional currency, or whether demand currency flows to project currency—still applies. The new UI respects those settings.
For subproject rollups: if parent and child projects share the same investment currency, values roll up properly. There's also a property (com.snc.project.multicurrency.rollup_if_different) that controls behavior when currencies differ.
Who Should Care About This
If you've got project managers who've been reluctant to move off classic project workbench because they need to see costs in their local currency—this removes that blocker.
If your demand managers have been asking for currency flexibility in SPW—now they have it.
If you're trying to increase adoption of the new workspaces and multi-currency was the objection—time to revisit those conversations.
Important note:
Please wait for Q1 2026 release of Project workspace before upgrading to the new multi-currency plugin if your current organization process fall under the below two categories:
- If you have projects with cost plans associated with project tasks instead of directly to projects, investment currency rollups do not work yet.
- If you are an existing customer who wants to migrate financial baselines with project currency values to new 'investment currency' values.
Have questions about the implementation or running into edge cases? Drop them in the comments. I'm curious to hear how this lands for those of you with complex multi-currency setups.
