Lots of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system managers are managing multiple organizations’ or subsidiaries’financial data as part of a parent company.  Reconciling information coming from different units, departments, and at times, with more than one currency can be problematic without the assistance of a proficient financial consolidation and reporting tool.  Parent company decision makers are navigating increasingly larger amounts of company data by seeking a Business Intelligence (BI) software that comes equipped with a hearty, easy-to-use consolidation tool.  For individuals facing this challenge, we at Coe Solutions know that it can be trying, but we also know that, particularly for common ERP users, options that bring together ease of use and dynamic power in a single reporting tool are rare.

In the world of finance, consolidations can be defined as the collection and combination of transactional information from different places into aggregated financial statements.  These statements combine subsidiary information into an accessible, direct analysis with eliminations to reconcile any inter-company exchanges, and conversions for differences in currency, as well as additional adjustments that, sans a powerful consolidation module, require tedious, homegrown reporting to take the pulse of a parent company and its subsidiaries.  There are plenty of reasons, besides wanting to get away from manual spreadsheet consolidations, finance teams are seeking a solution that will ensure that more than one company’s financial data come together in one statement.

Depending on a corporation’s specific challenges and goals, accounting professionals are searching for a powerful, ultra-modern, automated consolidation tool for a wide range of motives.   Some are hoping to move away from the older tools that are too intense for the business user, like Cognos TM1 or Hyperion, which require IT management.  Other finance teams are likely wanting to steer away from the tools that are also older, but too simple for their financial consolidation needs, like Enterprise Reporting or FRx.

One Chief Financial Officer we conversed with was managing the financial data of subsidiaries in more than one country, which entails tedious, varied national stipulations and currency exchanges (a prime example would be inputting IFRS to GAAP adjustments, or International Financial Reporting Standards to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, for compliance in international accounting).  Furthermore, there are software options that go deeper with data than traditional consolidation software, moving beyond the general ledger – and are part of a larger, comprehensive suite of BI tools, including ad-hoc reporting,  budgeting, forecasting, modeling, dashboards, and data warehousing.  We at Coe Solutions think it is important to know all the options of a consolidation module for Microsoft Dynamics and other ERP systems – and therefore, this article explores what you have to know when upgrading your BI analyses to 21^st century standards.