If you’re one of the many Intacct customers who is responsible for overseeing the financials of multiple subsidiaries for a parent company, Martin & Associates is rooting for you.  Consolidating company data from more than one subsidiary for a unified portfolio, sometimes with diverse types of currency, can be tedious without one of today’s powerful financial consolidations solutions.  As data continues to grow in size and significance for corporate decision-making processes, more Chief Financial Officers are shopping around for the best software that can enable business end users to aggregate transactional and operational information into a singular set of financial statements.  In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits associated with your modern, streamlined, and intuitive software options for financial consolidations to get a sense of parent company financial health.

First, let’s define the term, so we’re all on the same page.  Financial consolidations refer to aggregating transactional data from subsidiaries into one set of financial reports for a parent corporation.  These statements consist of subsidiary information and directly demonstrate the financial health of the parent company.  Consolidations typically entail conversions of diverse kinds of currency, elimination adjustments for transactions between subsidiary entities, and any additional changes that have to be done manually without today’s consolidation software.  We could write a long list of motives for executives beginning their search for a modern tool, but there are two overarching reasons that stick out to us.

There are plenty of reasons to upgrade, especially when thinking about the responsibility of overseeing a portfolio for a large corporation, but it can boil down to the simple reason of age.  Your finance team might be considering an upgrade because their mature consolidations tool is too simple for business demands of today, like manual Excel spreadsheet aggregations.  Others have the opposite problem – their older application are too complicated for business end user to manage, like Cognos or Hyperion.

At Martin & Associates, we are often talking to professionals (and Intacct customers) who are managing the financials for a multi-national parent company.  These individuals have to routinely perform currency conversions, in addition to meeting national and international accounting standards, like the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles adjustments (GAAP), also known as IFRS to GAAP.  There are some consolidation tools that offer in-depth analytics with sub-ledger reporting, and some are even positioned within a complete suite of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, fully integrated with other modules like ad-hoc reporting, planning processes, data visualizations, and BI data storage.  Let’s explore the details of modern financial consolidations for Intacct customers, particularly what you need to know before you start searching for the best solution for your company.

To continue learning more about financial consolidations for Intacct, read the rest of this article here.