If your group companies trade with each other, lend each other money or share costs, you need to remove those internal transactions from your group reports.
Spreadsheet adjustments can handle this, but someone has to maintain them, check the formulas and make sure the latest figures are included each month.
With Joiin, you can manage eliminations alongside your consolidated reporting. Joiin Intelligence can help you set them up through a simple conversation. And if your team prefers to work in Excel, the eliminated figures can flow straight into your workbooks.
What are intercompany eliminations?
Intercompany eliminations remove transactions between companies in the same group from consolidated reports.
For example, Company A lends £20,000 to Company B. Company A records an amount owed to it, while Company B records an amount it owes. Both entries belong in the individual company accounts. At group level, however, the money is owed internally, so those balances need to be eliminated.
The same principle applies to internal sales and purchases. Removing them means the group’s reports reflect its business with customers and suppliers outside the group.
How can you automate the process?
The starting point is to move your elimination setup into your consolidation software.
In Joiin, you create elimination groups for the companies and accounts involved, then reuse those settings when running your reports. For Xero and QuickBooks companies, you can also eliminate by contact in Sales & Purchasing reports, or by a combination of account and contact in financial reports.
For an intercompany loan, that means grouping the relevant loan accounts across the companies involved. Joiin removes the selected balances from the consolidated reports when eliminations are applied.
You can also create different elimination sets for different reporting needs, so the setup is ready to use again next month.
Where does AI help?
Joiin Intelligence, the AI layer built into Joiin, helps with the setup.
Instead of selecting everything manually, you can describe what you need in the chat. For example:
“Set up an intercompany loan elimination between Acme UK and Acme Ireland.”
The Elimination Agent can create elimination sets, build elimination groups by account or contact across companies, and add account exclusions. It explains the proposed changes and asks for your approval before applying them, then shows you what changed.
Prefer to work in Excel?
Your eliminations don’t stay locked inside Joiin. With the Joiin Add-In for Excel, you can pull consolidated Trial Balance, Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet figures into your workbooks with your eliminations already applied.
By default, the formulas use your default elimination set. You can also choose a specific set, show the eliminations on their own, or switch them off. Your team keeps its Excel models, without rebuilding the elimination adjustments by hand each month.
What if the balances don’t match?
Automation doesn’t remove the need to check the figures.
If one company records £20,000 and the other records £19,500, the finance team still needs to establish the reason for the difference. A saved elimination group does not resolve the underlying mismatch.
Joiin offers an optional netting adjustment to account for differences between the selected balances in your reports. But the team still needs to understand those differences and decide how to handle them.
Ready for next month’s reports
Moving your elimination setup out of manual spreadsheet adjustments gives your team a saved setup they can apply every time they run group reports, in Joiin or in Excel. When the group changes, you can review and update that setup rather than start again.
AI helps with creating the eliminations. Your finance team keeps control of the decisions and checks.
For the setup steps, see our guide to eliminations, our guide to Joiin Intelligence and our guide to the Joiin Add-In for Excel.
Want to see how it works with your group? Book a demo or start your free 14-day trial.
