As a finance and accounting leader, you know more than anyone that selecting the right financial consolidation software for your business is a rigorous process. You need a solution that not only provides speed and accuracy but also offers an intuitive experience that your team will embrace.
This blog offers a practical checklist to guide your evaluation and help you separate substance from sales talk — so you can compare vendors on what matters and choose a solution that optimizes your process today and scales to meet your needs tomorrow.
Data model and controls
Start by confirming the platform’s foundation — a governed, flexible data model with the right controls. If this layer is weak, everything downstream becomes slower, riskier, and less trusted.
- Rules-based set-up: Finance should configure consolidation, translation, and ownership rules without coding or scripting knowledge as a requirement.
- Robust dimensionality: Confirm support for entities, accounts, scenarios, periods, and custom dimensions — with the ability to create alternate hierarchies for statutory and management views.
- Audit logs: Require end-to-end, immutable logs showing who changed what and when to support SOX and external audit reviews.
- Rigorous governance: Enforce role-based access, approvals, and segregation of duties so no single user can both post and approve sensitive activities.
Core consolidation capabilities
These are your non-negotiables. Validate that core GAAP/IFRS processes are automated, transparent, and auditable — not stitched together with manual workarounds and IT dependence.
- Subsidiaries: Complete support for new acquisitions, business units, investments, divestitures, and other legal entity shifts.
- Intercompany eliminations: Automated eliminations and reconciliations (including profit deferrals) with clear audit trails.
- Currency conversion: Consistent and accurate translation and remeasurement across entities; correct handling of foreign currency impacts.
- Journal entries and adjustments: Controlled, auditable topside and recurring entries with approvals.
- Alternate hierarchies: Multiple roll-ups (legal, regional, management) without duplicating data.
- No code architecture: Legacy systems depend on IT for set-up and maintenance. Modern financial consolidation tools empower your team to make system updates and configurations without any coding expertise required.
Advanced needs
Look beyond the trial balance. Your team may need streamlined disclosure and narrative financial reporting workflows so reporting doesn’t spill into spreadsheets and email threads, or ownership structures that can be adjusted on the fly.
- Disclosure management (native or integrated): note authoring, tie-outs, and report packages to draft, review, and publish faster.
- Narrative financial reporting: Collaboration, commentary ownership, and publication controls that link numbers to narrative.
- Flexible ownership structures: Manage complex ownership arrangements, including non-controlling interests aligned to IFRS and GAAP, equity pickups, and minority stakes, ensuring compliance and control.
Performance and scale
Late changes are inevitable. Your platform should re-consolidate quickly and handle more entities, currencies, and periods without bogging down cycle times.
- Fast recalculation: Ability to re-run consolidation late in the cycle without lag, with clear status and error handling.
- Proven benchmarks: Target sub-week closes and verify that automation and standardization help maintain speed as complexity grows.
Ease of ownership
Choose a solution finance can own and manage. That means admin independence, low maintenance, strong integration, and built-in orchestration for a predictable, repeatable consolidation cycle.
- Admin independence: Finance and accounting users update rules, mappings, and hierarchies without code.
- Intuitive user experience (UX): Modern UX that reduces the learning curve and fosters user acceptance and adoption.
- Low maintenance: Evergreen upgrades and backward compatibility limit regression testing.
- Integration tooling: Connectors and APIs into ERPs, general ledgers (GLs), subledgers (SLs), and financial and operational systems to reduce data silos.
- Automation and collaboration: Built-in tasking, sign-offs, and certifications to accelerate your consolidated reporting cycle.
Planning integration
Actuals and plans should live at the same grain. Insist on seamless synchronization into FP&A so forecasts, reforecasts, and “what-if” analysis reflect the latest consolidated results.
- Seamless synchronization into FP&A models: Push consolidated actuals, structures, and metadata directly into planning to enable rolling forecasts, driver models, and “what-if” scenarios.
See how Anaplan meets this checklist
The Anaplan platform is designed to meet the needs of modern finance teams, from robust consolidation capabilities to seamless integration with financial planning.
The Financial Consolidation application streamlines complex consolidations with rules-based automation, intercompany eliminations, currency translation, noncontrolling interest, journals with approvals, and alternate hierarchies — all with robust audit trails and role-based controls.
The Integrated Financial Planning application connects your consolidated actuals with your plans to enable rolling forecasts, driver-based models, and rapid “what-if” analysis with AI at the core to drive smarter, faster decisions.
The asks and expected cadence of today’s finance leaders demands modern solutions that can keep pace. Making the best decision about financial consolidation software for your business can ensure readiness for what comes next.
