Consolidated Reporting and Multicompany

The Multicompany feature automates the generation of multicompany financial statements.

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 multicompany enterprises set up a consolidation group that includes all companies, so they can generate consolidated reports for the entire enterprise.

You use Configuration > Organization > Consolidated Reporting to:

• Set up consolidation groups.

• Specify any elimination accounts other than those Vision eliminates automatically.

• If you are also using the Multicurrency feature, to specify the translations Vision uses between currencies.

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.

• Vision 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 Vision to eliminate when it processes a consolidation for that group. For example, you can eliminate accounts for loans between companies in the group and equity accounts representing subsidiary holdings.

Standards Supported

Different countries have different standards governing how multicompany consolidation reporting can be performed. Vision Multicompany 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

You process consolidations in Accounting. We recommend that you process consolidations once each month, immediately before you generate the consolidated general ledger reports. If you change accounting information (for example, you re-run revenue generation) after you process consolidations for a period, you must process consolidations again, or the information on your consolidated reports may be inaccurate.

Consolidated General Ledger Budgeting

You establish general ledger budgets for your consolidation groups in Accounting.

Consolidated General Ledger Reports

You generate consolidated financial statements in Reporting.