Financial consolidation statements provide a unified overview of the liabilities, assets, cash flow, and equity of a group of subsidiary companies under a parent business, or multiple segments within the same group. In large and complex businesses, however, the process of financial consolidation can be laborious and prone to errors, often undermining the benefits of financial consolidation statements.
A financial statement consolidation software platform streamlines the process and improves both accuracy and visibility for key stakeholders, increasing the value of your consolidated statements as a financial planning and budgeting tool.
1) No Need To Change Your Accounting System
Financial consolidation involves extracting and combining data from multiple ERP systems, databases, and spreadsheets – and not all accounting systems have the features to perform this cross-platform task effectively. A stand-alone financial consolidation software solution avoids the need to change or upgrade your current ERP, saving you potentially months of implementation work and minimising disruption to your business.
2) Fewer Errors
Faced with the need to combine multiple sources of truth across various platforms, many businesses resort to spreadsheets to create consolidated financial statements. This brings the same risk of inaccuracies and errors that comes with any spreadsheet-based process. If you’re not careful, you might alter the wrong formula, and it is easy to make a typing error that affects the accuracy of your statements – issues that can be very difficult to locate manually when using spreadsheets. Consolidated financial reporting software leaves less room for human error than manually processing your financial reports, saving time, and increasing the reliability of your statements.
3) Up-to-date Data
At best, a consolidated financial statement provides a snapshot of your business’s financial health at a given moment. In a volatile market or during rapid growth, statements can quickly become out of date. A financial consolidation platform includes a dashboard that is continually populated with up-to-date financial data from all the data sources, giving stakeholders up-to-date management information on demand from any Internet-enabled device. Data is ready and available for consolidation as soon as the period is closed.
4) Add New Companies And Streams
Companies change and develop all the time, which is why some businesses are required by law to create consolidated financial statements at statutory intervals. A financial consolidation system makes it easier for users to change the parameters of their statements to include new companies, subsidiaries, and segments – without having to set up new spreadsheets, completely change formulae, and re-export data every time a change occurs.
Find Out More
Corporate Planner includes a powerful financial statement consolidation feature that users can customise to create incisive financial statements at the click of a button, drawing from multiple data sources.
To find out more about Corporate Planner and the benefits of using an integrated financial planning and forecasting platform, please call one of our specialists today on +44 1242 578966.
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