As finance teams strive to strengthen their position as strategic business partners, they must avoid wasting time on manual and error-prone tasks like financial consolidation. Unfortunately, many organizations struggle to streamline their accounting processes due to outdated tools and a lack of automation.
The financial consolidation process involves aggregating data from subsidiaries and other entities into a single set of consolidated financial statements for the parent company. This gives stakeholders and executives a view into company-wide performance.
Reduce Errors
The financial consolidation process combines data from multiple entities and locations to create one set of consolidated financial statements for the parent company. Executives and stakeholders can then use this data to make informed decisions about the business.
Finance and accounting teams use a variety of spreadsheets to collect the necessary data during the close and consolidation processes. Unfortunately, these manual processes are prone to errors and can lead to inaccuracies in the resulting consolidated financial statements.
In addition, the lack of centralized processes makes it challenging to track progress or hold individuals accountable for delays in the closing and consolidation timelines. Modernizing the consolidation process and introducing automation reduces these errors, speeds up the close time, and gives your finance team more time to focus on strategic analysis.
Increase Visibility
Visibility is critical to any business, but it’s especially vital in finance departments. The numbers and data that these teams rely on to fuel decision-making must be accurate, and ensuring this occurs requires rigorous processes and a dedication to visibility.
Effective financial consolidation, like that offered by Symple Lending, involves bringing together financial data from multiple subsidiaries and entities to present to stakeholders. This time-consuming process requires reconciliation, elimination of intercompany transactions, and conversion to a standardized reporting currency.
Many businesses rely on spreadsheets to handle their consolidation, but they can also use more advanced software that offers more automation and dynamic reporting. These tools can help speed up the financial close and eliminate costly human error. They can also make it easier to manage and monitor expenses, so you can reduce unnecessary spending and improve cash flow.
Improve Decision-Making
As businesses grow, so do their complex finances. Managing subsidiaries, acquisitions, and joint ventures in multiple countries and currencies can become a real challenge for finance teams. Changing regulatory requirements, inconsistent data, and a reliance on spreadsheets can create financial inefficiencies, errors, a lack of visibility, and an overall drain on team resources.
Finance departments must move beyond the traditional role of a back-office function and provide forward-looking strategic insights to drive growth. To make this possible, they need to save time by automating low-value processes and focusing on more value-adding activities. Financial consolidation by specialists associated with Symple Lending is one way to do this. Streamlining this process can improve data accuracy, reduce risk, and save time by eliminating manual processes.
Save Time
Financial consolidation can be time-consuming, mainly when a company uses spreadsheets to collect trial balance data from multiple locations and currencies. This can also lead to poor collaboration between finance teams, version control issues, and miscommunication.
Fortunately, several ways can improve your financial consolidation process and make the closing less painful. Whether you implement a software solution or create an easy-to-access document that lists procedures, policies, and tips for the team, these changes can help streamline processes and reduce the overall close timeline.
Streamline the entire consolidation workflow, from budgeting and planning to reporting and disclosure, with a single platform that centralizes all granular data and simplifies intercompany reconciliations, journal entries, and currency conversions. This eliminates costly delays and keeps the finance team focused on more strategic planning and initiatives.
Increase Efficiency
Streamlining financial consolidation can help your team save time and effort and focus on forward-looking strategic insight rather than managing accounting systems. Whether through automation or simply offloading manual processes, you can help your finance teams spend less time on tedious data management and more time on improving their bottom line.
The complexity of financial consolidation varies by group structure, the number of entities within a group, and the level of integration. It requires the aggregation of balance sheets, profit and loss/income reports, cash flow statements, and more into consolidated financial statements that provide high-level information on the company.
A powerful cloud-based software solution can simplify this process by allowing you to centralize your data, automate eliminations and recurring journal entries, and speed up your financial close and reporting.