Tillo trades in 23 countries and 23 currencies across 4 legal entities, and closes its books in 5 days.
That combination is worth pausing on, because in most finance systems those 2 facts are in tension. Currency count drives close duration, and it drives it non-linearly: each additional currency adds revaluation runs, translation adjustments, a new set of rate decisions and another reconciliation between what the subsidiary reported and what the group booked. A 23-currency close, done the traditional way, is not a 5 day exercise.
The reason it is one here is structural. Currency is a property of the transaction, not a translation performed on top of it at period end.
currencies Tillo revalues across, in 23 countries, on 1 ledger
day close at Tillo across all 4 entities, down from 12
countries supported out of the box, from US GAAP to UK MTD VAT
2 ways to hold a foreign currency amount
The first way, which most systems inherited from an era when storage was expensive, is to convert on entry. The transaction is recorded in the functional currency at the rate that applied that day, and the original amount lives in a memo field if it survives at all. Everything downstream then becomes a correction: revaluation entries to bring monetary balances back to the current rate, translation adjustments to move from functional to presentation currency, and a cumulative translation account that only the person who built it fully understands.
The second way is to record the transaction in the currency it happened in, keep the rate that applied, and derive every view from that. Functional currency reporting is a derivation. Group presentation currency is a derivation. Revaluation is a calculation over records that still contain their original terms, not a repair to records that lost them.
The second way is more expensive to build and considerably cheaper to operate, which is why it tends to appear in systems designed after multi-entity trading became normal rather than before.
What it removes from the close
At Tillo, FX revaluation across 23 currencies runs as part of the ledger rather than as a month-end project. The entities do not each close and then hand up a translated pack. All 4 sit on 1 ledger, and the team works across the group by function: revenue, approvals, reconciliations, each done once for all 4 entities rather than 4 times over.
That is the specific thing that took the close from 12 days to 5. Not faster revaluation. The elimination of 4 separate closes and the reconciliation between them.
23 currencies, 4 entities, 5 days. Currency count stopped setting the length of the close.
KeyShot runs entities in Denmark and the United States, and its CFO describes what the change replaced: what once took days in Excel now happens instantly. Officeguru runs Denmark and Germany with a finance team of 2, which is only viable because currency handling is not a job somebody does.
Old model
Convert, then correct
Transactions convert on entry. Revaluation and translation entries at period end bring balances back in line, with a cumulative translation account absorbing the difference.
Light's model
Record the currency, derive the rest
The transaction keeps its original currency and rate. Functional and presentation views are derived. Revaluation calculates over intact records.
What changes
Currency count stops driving close time
Tillo revalues 23 currencies inside a 5 day close. The work does not scale with the number of currencies because it is not repeated per entity.
The audit argument
Currency is one of the places where an auditor's request list gets long, because the traditional evidence is derived rather than recorded. Proving a revaluation means proving the rate used, the balance it applied to and the date it applied on, usually from a spreadsheet that regenerated itself since.
When the original currency and rate sit on the transaction, and the ledger is immutable, that testing changes shape. The auditor pulls the full population through the API, sees the source amount alongside every derived view, and tests the calculation rather than reconstructing the inputs. Customers at $500M ARR have completed audits on this footing.
Who this actually matters for
A company selling in 1 currency and banking in 1 currency does not need any of this. The moment it opens a second entity abroad, or starts invoicing in the customer's currency, or raises from investors who want consolidated reporting monthly rather than annually, currency handling stops being a settings question and starts being a constraint on how fast the company can close.
Tillo's answer to that constraint was to stop treating currency as something applied to the books and start treating it as something the books contain. 23 currencies, 4 entities, 5 days. The number of currencies stopped being the variable that determines how long finance spends on the month.
See how Light handles multi-entity and multi-currency, or book a demo.