Consolidated Reporting for Multiple Companies

When you track multiple companies in Vantagepoint, you can generate consolidated financial statements that merge data from multiple companies.

Consolidation Groups

Your enterprise determines how financial results are consolidated by setting up consolidation groups. Each consolidation group represents a combination of companies for which data is merged on reports (for example, all European companies of a global enterprise).

You can set up as many consolidation groups as you need. Most enterprises set up a consolidation group that includes all companies, so that they can generate consolidated reports for the entire enterprise.

Use Settings > General Ledger > Consolidated Reporting to:

  • Set up consolidation groups.
  • Specify any elimination accounts other than those that are eliminated automatically.
  • Specify translations between currencies, if you are also tracking multiple currencies in Vantagepoint.

Eliminating Accounts to Produce Consolidated Reports

At the simplest level, consolidating financial results is a matter of taking balances for common accounts across companies and adding them together to arrive at overall account totals.

However, in practice you must eliminate certain accounts to produce consolidated reports.

  • Vantagepoint automatically eliminates accounts used solely to manage intercompany transactions, to the extent that these transactions are between the companies being consolidated. These include intercompany accounts receivable and intercompany accounts payable accounts.
  • In addition, you can specify any other accounts that you want to eliminate when a group is consolidated. For example, you can eliminate accounts for loans between companies in the group or equity accounts representing subsidiary holdings.

Supported Accounting Standards

Different countries have different standards governing how multicompany consolidation reporting can be performed. Vantagepoint's Multicompany application supports Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), International Accounting Standards ( IAS), and other accounting standards used throughout the world, and complies with FASB Statement 52.

Consolidation Process

Process consolidations in the Accounting application. Recommended timing is to process consolidations once each month, immediately before you generate consolidated general ledger reports. Process consolidations again if you change accounting information (for example, re-run Revenue Generation) after you process consolidations for a period, or the information on your consolidated reports may be inaccurate.

Consolidated General Ledger Reports

Generate consolidated financial statements in the Reporting application.