A frequent challenge in my work as a Dynamics 365 Finance consultant is the company consolidation process. Most companies I have recently worked with have many subsidiary companies in various countries; therefore, we need to create not only separate entities but also different charts of accounts (COA) that can meet regulatory requirements. For example, there’s a mandatory COA structure in Colombia that has to be managed to comply with statutory regulations.
There are many ways to accomplish proper company consolidation within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, such as using tools like Management Reporter (MR) or Dynamics 365 Finance Online Company Consolidation. Today, in this blog, I would like to focus on the latter.
Online Company Consolidation in Dynamics 365 Finance offers several benefits, which I will share in this blog, but first, let us talk about what online consolidation entails.
In order to run an online company consolidation in Dynamics 365 Finance, the first thing we need is a consolidation COA to ensure everything works seamlessly. It usually will be the leading company’s COA, which will also be helpful when setting up consolidation accounts.
We also must create a consolidation entity to consolidate transactions into the statutory or the global COA (this will depend on what accounts we want to visualize in the reports). This entity will be alongside the other legal entities within the system. Statutory accounts can be mapped to the global COA in the consolidation account field.
When performing the online consolidation, we can select an option to use consolidation accounts, and Dynamics 365 Finance will move the transactions to the account’s setup in the COA for the consolidation company. It is quite common to have more than one source account merge into a consolidation account.
There are many benefits of running Online Company Consolidations in Dynamics 365 Finance, some of them are:
In conclusion, Online Company Consolidation in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance will facilitate the consolidation process and help you maintain consistency, gain visibility, and, most importantly, obtain enough flexibility to add new entities for consolidations efficiently and effectively.