If you’re stitching together enterprise resource planning (ERP) add-ons, offline spreadsheets, and brittle rules, your reporting speed slows, risk rises, and your team spends more time fixing than analyzing. Legacy platforms often require heavy IT lift and customizations, and siloed data undermines accuracy and confidence when you’re under pressure to deliver decision-ready statements.
This blog lays out the essential capabilities your business should require in any financial consolidation and reporting solution.
1) Comprehensive entity, ownership, and currency modeling
Your solution should natively handle partial and changing ownership, non-controlling interests, equity pickups, and minority interests, while translating multiple operating currencies to reporting and budget rates. When these mechanics are built in, you adapt smoothly as structures evolve and avoid risky manual adjustments.
What to look for:
- Support for complex ownership: minority interests, equity pickups, and layered rollups
- Ability to create multiple hierarchies for supporting alternative roll-ups and presentations
- Multi-currency translation to reporting and budget rates with comparative analysis
- Time-based ownership changes that flow cleanly across periods
- End-to-end auditability of ownership and multi-currency calculations
2) Automated intercompany eliminations that support any accounting standard
Intercompany eliminations should be rules-driven, transparent, and repeatable. Your platform must support multiple accounting frameworks — such as US GAAP, IFRS, ASPE — so corporate and local statutory requirements move in lockstep with clear traceability from consolidated figures to source entries.
What to look for:
- Out-of-the-box eliminations for balances and transactions
- Preconfigured logic aligned to key accounting standards
- Drill-through and audit trails to support internal and external review
- Side-by-side local statutory and corporate reporting
3) Finance-owned, no-code configuration and rapid time to value
You need a cloud-native environment that finance configures without relying on specialist coding. Pre-built calculations, reports, and workflows shrink services spend, eliminate IT dependence, and let you respond quickly when business requirements change.
What to look for:
- Prebuilt logic for common consolidation scenarios and disclosures
- Role-based access, SSO, and governed collaboration for contributors and reviewers
- Proven time-to-value from starter models, templates, and reports
- Extensibility without code to add entities, rules, or rates as the business evolves
4) Connected data integrations for a single source of truth
Consolidation thrives on clean, connected data. Your platform should unify ERPs, general ledgers (GLs), subledgers (SLs), and financial and operational systems — even with different charts of accounts and fiscal calendars — and provide robust connectors and APIs so mapped data flows into one governed model. It's more critical than ever to leverage modern solutions that eliminate data reconciliation across silos and give stakeholders trust in the numbers.
What to look for:
- Integration to multiple ledgers and subledgers across subsidiaries and regions
- Mappings from disparate charts and fiscal years to corporate standards
- Modern APIs/ETL connectors with secure credential management
- Clear lineage and controls to support audit and consistency checks
5) Built-in reporting, disclosure, and ad hoc analysis
Pair governed statutory and regulatory reporting workflows with flexible analysis so you can produce statutory reports, board materials, and management packs from the same governed data — without version chaos or manual rework.
What to look for:
- Co-authoring in an easy-to-use environment with workflow, notifications, version control, and full audit trails
- Multi-source documents, dynamic text, and consistency checks across sections
- Ad hoc and management reporting with drill, slice/dice, highly formatted layouts, and web sharing for scheduled distribution
- Visualization best practices and executive-friendly layouts that improve clarity for decision makers
Your path to confident financial consolidation and reporting
Anaplan equips you to handle complex financial consolidation and reporting requirements — including non-controlling interests, equity pickups, and minority interests — and perform multi-currency translation for all your local, functional, and reporting requirements. Intercompany eliminations are automated and easily reconciled. Business users can reduce IT-dependence and configure the platform to support any and all needed accounting frameworks, including US GAAP, IFRS, and ASPE.
With our out-of-the-box applications, your team is up and running fast in a cloud-native, finance-owned environment with access to pre-built rules and report templates. Unlimited ERPs, GLs, SLs, and financial and operational systems are all run through connectors and APIs to create a single, governed source of truth.
Finally, when it’s time to communicate to your board and stakeholders, you can deliver financial and narrative reporting with co-authoring, workflow, and audit trails that allow your team to stay within a Microsoft Office environment to manage ad hoc and management reporting that is IBCS certified.
