Is month end a real pain for you and your team?  Do you have:

• complex processes,
• intricate eliminations,
• difficult minority interest calculations,
• tricky foreign exchange translations
• poor visibility into reporting units accounts,
• arduous statutory reporting requirements,
• a web of spreadsheets

Would you like more time for you and your team to interact with the business adding value, rather than collecting and processing data and maintaining spreadsheets?

For any company that has subsidiaries or associates, group accounting, or consolidation, is a necessary part of the monthly accounting processes.  Whether the result is to produce statutory reporting to produce internal management reporting that crosses the entire group, the consolidation exercise is required.

Group statutory reporting

Statutory reporting for submission to the regulators, ultimately for the preparation of a company’s Annual Report, requires the development of detailed financial and non financial information from across the group of companies.  This might include your Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Statements, to the Notes required to support these statements and the additional information required by each statutory entity, such as Director’s Emoluments, Lease and Debt liability schedules, Segment Reporting either Geographically or by Industry.

Group management reporting

From the perspective of managing the overall group of companies, management reporting is probably more important than statutory reporting. Whether it is providing detailed reports supporting the statutory reports for Board consideration, or daily, weekly or monthly reports for all levels of your company, from the senior executives to the profit center manager.

We implement IBM Cognos Controller:

The group accounting software that helps your finance organization manage the close, consolidation and reporting process. With it you can:

• Automate your entire close process, from data collection to financial consolidation to output. Reduce close cycle times, assure data integrity and gain the transparency that is essential for sustained compliance with regulatory authorities.
• Reduce consolidation, close and reporting cycles by days or weeks—with a single version of the facts and automated validation.
• Consolidate multiple ledgers and accounts into a common chart-of-accounts structure.
• Create reports rapidly to facilitate compliance with IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404.
• Evaluate financial results with accuracy across multiple geographies, currencies and legal entities, each with their own accounting policies intact.
• Support better planning and forecasting with reliable consolidated management data, based on a clear link between statutory and management consolidation.