Financial consolidation for groups that close in more than 1 ledger.

We survey how your ownership table, your rate table and your intercompany balances are held before we quote. The price is fixed on what the survey finds.

Read about the office of the CFO Start a conversation

Financial consolidation turns the ledgers of every entity into 1 group result.

Financial consolidation takes every entity's closed ledger, applies ownership, translates the currencies and removes the intercompany trade to produce 1 group result. Constancia is an EPM consultancy that builds that consolidation for multi-entity groups with a legacy platform and a date to close by.

IFRS 10 sets 3 tests for control: power over an entity, exposure to its returns and the ability to use that power over those returns. The ownership table in the data model records which of the group's entities pass all 3, and at what percentage.

Where a group bought 3 subsidiaries in 3 different years, the consolidation workbook usually still holds the ownership percentage from the year of each purchase. The group financial controller learns which percentage has since changed when the auditor asks why the minority interest moved.

Ownership, currency translation and intercompany are where a consolidated group number breaks.

Each join lives in a workbook in most groups we survey, and each workbook has 1 author.

The ownership table decides how much of each entity the group counts.

Every entity carries its percentage held, its consolidation method and the date each of those last changed, in the model rather than in a workbook. A change in ownership is then a dated entry that the next close picks up on its own.

Full consolidation or the equity method, set per entity and per period
Minority interest calculated from the same table the eliminations read

Currency translation applies 1 published rate table to every entity's balances.

The rate table holds the closing rate, the average rate and the historical rate for each currency and period, and 1 person owns it. Every translated balance then traces to the rate it used, and the translation difference lands in reserves where IAS 21 puts it.

Balance sheet at the closing rate, income statement at the average rate
Equity at the historical rate, so the translation reserve reconciles
Rates loaded once, from 1 source, on a dated schedule

Intercompany elimination nets every pair of entities to zero before the group total exists.

Each entity books its side of a transaction in its own ledger, and the 2 sides differ by timing, currency or an unsettled dispute. The consolidation matches the pairs, posts the difference to a named account and eliminates the balance the 2 entities agree on.

Matching by counterparty, currency and period, inside the platform
A tolerance the group financial controller sets and the auditor can see
Differences posted to 1 account with 1 owner, never spread across the pair
Profit in stock removed where 1 entity sells to another

A consolidation build has 5 stages, and its parallel run proves the other 4.

01
Survey
We sit through 1 close and read the ownership table, the rate table and the intercompany matching as your team runs them.
02
Price
We fix the build price on what the survey found, so an entity whose ledger failed to reconcile is already priced in.
03
Design
The design document names the entity dimension, the account hierarchy, the ownership table and the rate table, with 1 owner and 1 date against each.
04
Build
The consultants who ran the survey build the eliminations, the translation and the ownership adjustments in OneStream (EPM software), with no handover between.
05
Parallel run
The new consolidation runs beside the old one, close by close, until the difference between them is zero and your group financial controller signs.

Constancia has completed 58 implementations over 35 years, and the same people carry each one from the survey to the parallel run.

4 conditions tell us a group's consolidation is work we should take on.

01
Ledgers in more than 1 ERP
The entities close in 2 or more ERPs, and somebody maps each chart of accounts to the group chart by hand.
Read about close automation
02
A legacy consolidation with a sunset date
HFM, BPC or IBM Controller still produces the group result, and its vendor has published the date support ends.
Read about migrations
03
A date the consolidation has to be ready for
An IPO, an acquisition completing or a first group audit is already in the diary, and the current close will not reach it.
Read about statutory reporting
04
Intercompany that lives in a workbook
The matching and the eliminations run in a spreadsheet that 1 person maintains, outside the system the auditor tests.

A single entity closing in 1 ledger has no consolidation to build, and its ERP already produces the accounts it files.

Financial consolidation runs on 1 of 2 OneStream editions, and the entity count chooses between them.

OneStream (EPM software)

The full platform, for a group with entities in several currencies

For a group whose close, consolidation, plan and board pack will sit on 1 platform
Ownership, rates and intercompany matching held in the model the entities load to
Statutory, management and tax views of the same consolidated result

OneStream CPM Express

The standard model, for a mid-market group leaving its workbooks

For a group with fewer entities and 1 or 2 currencies, consolidating in spreadsheets today
The same consolidation engine, in a model OneStream has already built
A route onto the full platform when the group's structure outgrows it

Constancia is an official OneStream partner with certified consultants, and Abacum (FP&A software) takes the plan once the consolidation is settled.