About the authorMarcel FreyMarcel Frey has been working in IT and Business consulting for more than 20 years. He holds a Master in Business Economics from the University of Lausanne. Mr. Frey has been working with planning and consolidation systems since it’s early days, then in an expert level job in the SAP EMEA organization for several years, before moving on the latest generation of project including Group Reporting and SAP Analytics Cloud. |
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This series of blogs will cover the functional and technical items having an impact on the time it takes to report your consolidated financial figures. A group reporting process is rather simple and unspectacular on paper. You collect data, you validate and match these data and you finally perform some calculations (currency conversion, intercompany eliminations) and finally maybe perform some top-level adjustments
What looks nice and straight forward on a flip chart starts to look a bit more complex when translated into the real-world, because of the structures, organizations and history of most groups. |
There are many aspects that have an impact and we are going to look at some of them more in details in the next posts:
Systems & Interfaces
- Accounting Systems Landscape (ERP)
- Non-Controlling participations in companies
- Handling of multiple Gaaps
- Validations in local ERP systems
- Interfaces between ERP and consolidation solution
Local Financial Processes:
- Operational accounting processes (including group accounting manual, intercompany booking guidelines, …)
- Local closing of books
- Level of qualification of local accountants
Consolidation processes
- Management Reporting vs. Legal Consolidation
- Complexity of consolidation (changes in the organizations)
To illustrate these points, an international group with 50 legal entities will be used. Different scenarios of that group will be used to illustrate the points and make them more tangible.
We will start to dive into the subject on the next post, starting with the Accounting System Landscape.