The consolidation workbook
Export each entity, paste into a template, apply eliminations by hand. Fine at two entities, fragile at four, a genuine financial-reporting risk at eight.
By structure
Entities accumulate by accident — an acquisition kept separate for an earn-out, a subsidiary set up for insurance, a holding company for the partners. The accounting rarely keeps up, and consolidation ends up in a monthly workbook that is unversioned, unaudited, and understood by exactly one person.
184 consecutive days tied · variance $0.00
The situation
Export each entity, paste into a template, apply eliminations by hand. Fine at two entities, fragile at four, a genuine financial-reporting risk at eight.
Recharges recorded on one side and not the other, or at different amounts. The difference is usually plugged, and the plug grows.
Entities close at different speeds, so the consolidation waits for the slowest and nobody can see what is blocking it.
Translation at a single rate, unrealised gains netted into a catch-all, and no cumulative translation adjustment in equity. It works until an auditor looks.
Each entity’s chart evolved separately, so mapping happens at consolidation time and no two months map identically.
When a transaction arrives, consolidated statements assembled by hand cannot be traced to source. That gets priced as risk rather than argued about.
Most consolidation tools produce a combined trial balance and leave eliminations to a journal somebody writes each month. That works while intercompany activity is small and regular, and it stops working exactly when it matters — after an acquisition, when recharges get complicated, or when a lender starts reading the consolidated statements closely.
Doing it structurally means intercompany transactions are identified as such when they are posted, matched to their counterparty side, and eliminated on a rule rather than a monthly judgement. Unmatched intercompany becomes a gated exception before consolidation rather than a plug afterwards.
The single highest-value decision in a multi-entity implementation is whether entities share a chart of accounts or maintain their own with a mapping. Both are workable and the failure mode is not choosing — charts drift apart, mapping happens ad hoc at consolidation, and no two months are comparable.
For most groups we recommend a shared chart with entity as a dimension, and local statutory differences handled by mapping at the reporting layer rather than by divergent charts. It is more work in month one and it removes a recurring reconciliation forever.
Transaction currency, functional currency, and reporting currency are three different things, and treating them as two is the most common source of restatement we see in multi-currency groups. Realised and unrealised gains post separately, and cumulative translation adjustment sits in equity where it belongs rather than being absorbed into a catch-all account.
If you have entities filing statutory returns in many jurisdictions, note that deep local compliance is not our strength — that points to NetSuite, and we would rather say so here.
Questions
Send your entity list and current process. We will show you what it looks like when it is computed rather than assembled.