Bank accounts in foreign countries do have the same advantage as discussed in previous article. You will save the exchange fee and the exchange rate, but you will also be doing domestic payments instead of doing international payments. Domestic payments are much cheaper than international payments. Typically, depending on your bank of course, a domestic payment costs EUR 1-5, while an international payment costs EUR 5-30.
A bank account in a foreign country will be more administration expensive. Maybe your own bank is not present in the needed country, so you need another bank, and you need to start up a new relationship with new bank contacts and by experience this is not necessarily easy. In fact, it is administratively hard to start up and most banks have many papers, which need to be read and signed and when you at last have your account, you will most likely have access by a new web software, which you need to learn as well.
In many cases you will also need to develop new file formats, if you intend to have an integration with your ERP-system – unless you are using AMC-Banking of course.
If you have either many international transactions and/or the transactions are of high amounts, it is definetely worth it.
We can do a similar calculation.
Assumptions:
- Transfer saving: EUR 8
- Exchange saving: EUR 10
- Monthly account costs: EUR 80
- Monthly administration costs: EUR 200
X × EUR 8 + X × EUR 10 = 12 months × EUR 200 + 12 months × EUR 80
X = (12 months × EUR 200 + 12 months × EUR 80)/(EUR 10 + EUR 8)
X 186
X = 186 transactions / year
Therefore it is possible to save costs by having bank accounts in foreign countries and maybe the administrative costs here are too high, but do not underestimate the work operating with bank accounts in foreign countries. Of course, if you have a heavy load of international payments, do consider bank accounts in foreign countries.
You can put your own calculations into the formula and even make it more accurate. Use it as a simple inspiration.
Advantages
- Great cost savings
Disadvantages
- It will only be cost effective if you have many international payments and/or many incoming payments are received frequently.
- Very hard to accomplish because of the heavy administration burden.
The catch
- Your ERP need to be able to handle more banks and more sender accounts. It also needs to be able to choose the right sender account depending of the actual currency and be able to choose the right payment type as well. Only few can do this. Of course, if you are using the AMC-Banking for Dynamics AX, you will be able to do this automatically.
Otherwise you can do this manually, but it can be hard to do, as it will be very work intensive.