Consolidations

Consolidations covers a chart of accounts mapped consistently across every entity in the group, identification and elimination of intercompany transactions and balances, a consolidated profit and loss and balance sheet, and entity-level financials preserved alongside the group view. A consolidation checklist documents every elimination made each month, including the entries it touches and the amount removed.

The exact scope, including how many entities are in the group, which entity owns which intercompany relationship, and whether minority ownership stakes require a non-controlling interest calculation, is agreed and set out in writing before work starts, so you know precisely what each month's consolidated package will and will not contain.

Each entity closes independently first, on the same close calendar used for a standard month-end close: bank and card accounts reconciled, accruals booked, trial balance reviewed line by line. Only once every entity's own close is final does the consolidation step begin.

We then map each entity's chart of accounts to a shared group structure, pull each entity's closed trial balance into the consolidation workpaper, and identify the specific intercompany transactions and balances that need eliminating for the period: intercompany loans, management fee charges, shared expense allocations and any internal sales. Each elimination is booked, logged on the checklist, and the consolidated trial balance is reviewed before the group financials are finalized and reviewed by a senior reviewer.

Restaurant and franchise groups running several locations under separate legal entities, real estate operators with one entity per property under a holding structure, manufacturers with a parent and one or more subsidiaries, and any business that formed a second entity for liability protection, financing, or a joint venture and now needs one number that represents the whole group.

It also fits a business preparing for a sale or a capital raise where a buyer or investor wants to see the group's combined performance rather than piecing it together from separate entity statements themselves.

The most frequent issue is an intercompany loan that was recorded as income or an expense on one side, rather than as a balance sheet receivable or payable between related entities, which overstates or understates both entities' profit and leaves the loan itself untracked. We also regularly find management fees or shared payroll costs allocated inconsistently, where one month an expense sits on the holding company's books and the next month it moves to the operating entity with no documented reason.

Another common problem is a chart of accounts mismatch that hides real duplication: one entity's "repairs and maintenance" line and another's "facilities" line covering the same type of cost under different names, which understates how much the group actually spends on that category until the accounts are mapped consistently.

Entities most often run on NetSuite or Sage Intacct when the group has built-in multi-entity and consolidation modules already, and we use those native tools where they exist rather than rebuilding the same logic in a spreadsheet. Where a group runs on QuickBooks Online, which does not natively consolidate multiple company files, we build the consolidation workpaper in Google Sheets or Excel, pulling each entity's trial balance in on a consistent template every month.

Mixed environments, where one entity runs on a different platform than the rest of the group, are workable as long as each entity's own books are reliable; the consolidation workpaper becomes the common layer across whatever each entity uses underneath it.

Consolidations are priced above a single-entity close, since each additional entity in the group adds its own reconciliation and close work before consolidation can even begin, and the elimination and mapping step is additional work on top of that. The published rate card at /us/pricing reflects per-entity pricing for exactly this reason: a two-entity group and a six-entity group are not the same engagement.

A group where the entities are not yet each individually reconciled and closed needs that groundwork scoped and priced first, since consolidating unreliable entity-level numbers only produces an unreliable group number faster.

Not every entity in a group closes its books on the same calendar. Where fiscal year ends differ, we agree a consolidation approach for the periods that do not align exactly, typically using each entity's most recent closed period and documenting the gap rather than forcing an artificial alignment. Where one entity owns less than 100 percent of another, the consolidated financials reflect a non-controlling interest for the portion the group does not own, calculated and disclosed separately from the parent's own equity.