Businesses that operate different lines of service will at times have a separate Chart of Accounts for separate companies. For instance, a business may distribute parts that they also provide service on, and have separate companies for each. The Distribution company would perhaps have a separate Chart of Accounts from the Service side.

But what do you do if you have a company that’s more global? You may need a different chart of accounts because of requirements or regulations in a foreign country, or because of the way they do business in that country, or perhaps because you inherited a chart of accounts through acquisition. In a scenario like that, trying to consolidate the multiple hierarchy’s could take a considerable amount of time.

With financial consolidation software, like Sage Intacct’s Global Consolidations, you can have automated currency conversion, eliminate inter-entity receivables and payables, and consolidate multiple views to gain real-time visibility to your operations.

Let’s take an example where you have entities in multiple countries around the world, running in different currencies. Using financial consolidation software, like Sage Intaccts Global Consolidation, and I can see your entire global organization in easy to view formats. With just a few clicks, you can view a group of companies in a base currency (such as US dollars), and consolidate all the entities. You then roll all the entities up to US dollars for the period, and they in turn will roll up to your top level company and give you financial information in a single chart of accounts that can be used to run reports against in a single consolidation. Even though the companies all have different charts of accounts, they all map to the top one selected. It only takes a few seconds or minutes to run, depending on the amount of data being consolidated. With Sage Intacct’s financial consolidation software, companies can run global consolidations on a daily basis, or even on an hourly if need be.