Implement a consolidation and reporting software quickly?
January 6, 2020
Today, one of the major challenges for the finance function is to be able to close and consolidate accounts reliably, within ever shorter deadlines, while meeting the standards and regulatory constraints in force. These requirements are forcing finance managers to give up their manual, time-consuming and repetitive habits, which carry a high risk of error. The implementation of a consolidation & close solution accelerates the reliability of consolidation, reconciliation of intra-group transactions and the closing of accounts. Teams can focus more on analysis and decision-making.
A consolidation software for faster and more secure consolidation and closure
Collaborating with an editor-integrator of rapid consolidation software allows you to benefit from adapted assistance and to take advantage of all the functionalities & automations that facilitate the publication of a group’s consolidated accounts.
- The performance of a statutory consolidation solution can be measured through more determining elements:
- The ability to work on the heterogeneity of data formats and sources
- Compliance management / adaptability in complex or decentralized environments
- The integration of consolidation restatement rules and their controls in an automatic way
- The ability to adapt to a decentralized organisation to allow centralized management
- The automatic publication of the consolidated accounts through the company’s brochure.
For TWAs whose financial stakes are at the international level, a statutory consolidation solution must respond to other constraints.
- Management of country specificities (accounting regulations, exchange rates, compliance) and centralized steering and supervision of the centralized chart of accounts.
- Management of multi-languages
- Multi-site issues
- Joining the fragmentation of information systems
- Management of the integration of external growth
- The Dispersion / heterogeneity of processes
- Fragmentation of computer systems
- Regulatory watch on the evolution of standards and their integration into the software
Finally, the software must support the organization in the management of hyper-growth.
- Real-time control / visibility of resources and needs
- Increase in back-office processing capacity, refocusing of tasks on activities with higher added value, acceleration of HR process processing: recruitment, onboarding, training, etc.
- Structuring financial planning
- Adapting and structuring the evolution of back-office processes as they evolve (agility issue)
The consolidation software is a tool specially designed to help the financial manager and the consolidator of the company to work faster without making mistakes. Operations and controls are largely automated to allow the consolidator to focus on variance analysis and adjustments. This type of solution goes further because it automates calculations and the implementation of consolidation methods.
Finally, this type of solution makes it possible to avoid omissions related to equity accounting and translation differences. Since the social situation of each subsidiary must be taken into account, the tools available make it possible to perform all these tasks more quickly, but without errors, and to obtain reliable results. The audit trail provides very quick access to social data from the consolidated tables. It is also important for a consolidation solution to be able to integrate data in different formats simply, in order to facilitate the integration of a subsidiary’s data (whatever its accounting model and the repository used).
The benefits of a complete CPM solution
With a complete CPM solution, it is possible to manage consolidation, intra-group reconciliation, but also reporting and budgeting in a single application.
All of this data is an indispensable support and decision-making tool for financial managers. Data collection, data processing, financial analysis, consolidation of information and reporting to managers are all operations that are error-free and particularly time-consuming and tedious to carry out using manual methods.
The use of a suitable solution helps to simplify the work of financial managers to the maximum.
Having all the data in the same application facilitates analysis and decision making for better business performance. Through restatements, automatic checks and automatic updates, operations are accelerated and teams have more time for analysis.