Finance leaders don’t need another pep talk about “doing more with less.” They need a faster, safer consolidation tool that provides decision-ready numbers. Yet many teams still wrestle with manual work and brittle systems — and it shows: 59% of accountants report several errors each month amid heavier workloads and rising regulatory pressure.
Below are four concrete reasons legacy consolidation tools hold you back — and what a modern financial consolidation solution enables.
4 ways your legacy consolidation tool limits your business
1) Rigid, IT-dependent platforms keep you from moving at the speed of the business
If every ownership change, entity addition, FX update, or GAAP/IFRS tweak becomes a mini project, the platform is taxing your consolidation cycle and your team. Modern finance and accounting has been shifting to business-owned processes and administration for a number of years, but some currently active vendors continue to sell and deploy solutions requiring heavy IT infrastructure and support.
Research from Gartner shows 70% of new applications will use low/no-code by the end of 2025, moving capability closer to the business.
What modern looks like:
- Finance-owned rule changes
- Shorter, more frequent consolidation cycles
- Configuration over code so you can adapt quickly when structures or standards shift
2) Data silos and brittle integrations block a single source of truth
Multiple ERPs, inconsistent charts of accounts, and fragile integrations often force offline workarounds and duplicate “truths”. These issues underscore how siloed systems and unstructured data complicate financial consolidation and hamper your transformation efforts. Deloitte’s guidance highlights how lack of visibility and governance gaps bog down finance tools — exactly the symptoms of legacy stacks.
What modern looks like:
- End-to-end automated, auditable processes that govern data loading, transformation, calculation lineage, journal entry, and financial reporting
- Clear and consistent mapping to your corporate accounting and reporting standards
- Automated intercompany matching, currency translation, and cash flow statements that eliminate offline workarounds
- Allows the business to incorporate data sources quickly, easily, and accurately, mitigating the need to rush ERP/GL unification
3) Technical debt and maintenance drain resources you need for change
Code-based rule engines, custom scripts, patches, and upgrade drama eat scarce IT time and stall your consolidated actuals. When your consolidation tool demands its own dedicated support staff, the return on investment (ROI) is already eroding.
What modern looks like:
- Cloud-native business administration using modern techniques (interface-driven, no code) for maintaining rules, calculations, and hierarchies
- Role-based control
- Fail-safe automatic software releases that do not interrupt your cycles nor entangle your IT resources
4) Multi-GAAP and IFRS changes keep moving — your consolidation needs to keep pace
IFRS, GAAP, and ASPE continue to evolve, and those updates should flow straight through to your consolidation account mappings and hierarchies, ownership and control drivers, rule and calculation sets, and disclosures. As an example, IASB has announced IFRS 18, which introduces significant changes in the presentation and disclosure of financial statements. This introduces new income statement accounts due to income and expense classification requirements along with new mandated subtotals within the statement of profit or loss. This will ripple into greater supporting disclosure requirements and potential issues with historical comparability. Your consolidation solution needs to be able to adapt to these changes quickly and accurately, without demanding support tickets and weeks of programming time and testing.
Many organizations also require dual reporting as they are multi-jurisdictional. While IFRS and US-GAAP are not terribly dissimilar, there are differences in how some results are derived and presented. For example, IFRS uses a single, control-based consolidation model, while US-GAAP applies both the voting interest and VIE models — differences that can drive separate consolidation logic, eliminations, and disclosures when you report under both bases.
What modern looks like:
- Automatic, agile releases allow your business to benefit from the latest features and functionality improvements while ensuring the integrity of your IFRS, US-GAAP, and ASPE rules and calculations
- Unequivocal support for multiple consolidated outputs with fully auditable lineage
- Business-driven model, rule, and calculation administration with a straight-forward, intuitive experience
Where Anaplan fits in
Whether you’re ready to evaluate vendors or just beginning your journey, Anaplan is here to help you modernize your financial consolidation process with:
- Purpose-built, finance-owned, true SaaS consolidation. Centralize consolidation across entities and jurisdictions with auditability, reliability, and scalability.
- Automated complexity. Handle intercompany eliminations, currency translation, and flexible, changing ownership structures with intuitive, digestible logic and calculations.
- Data you can trust. Connect ERPs/GLs and other financial and operational systems for a governed, unified view across your entire organization.
- Reporting and disclosure ecosystems. Extend your consolidation with financial reporting and narrative reporting in a finance-owned workflow and data-connected Microsoft Office productivity suite.
