Financial consolidation combines data across entities into a single, accurate view of financial performance, helping organisations understand results and make informed decisions.
This guide will explore financial consolidation and reporting, offering insights and practical examples.
What is Financial Consolidation?
Financial consolidation involves aggregating financial statements from different segments of an organisation, to provide unified view of financial performance. This process helps stakeholders understand overall business health.
Key elements of financial consolidation include:
- Combining various financial statements
- Eliminating intercompany transactions
- Adjusting for currency differences
The primary goal of financial consolidation is accuracy, giving you a true picture of performance. Automating this work also saves significant time and cost, allowing finance teams to focus on decisions rather than data preparation.
Additionally, it offers insights into financial risks and opportunities. Consequently, effective consolidation is essential for corporate governance. Ultimately, it plays a significant role in aligning financial strategies with business objectives.
The Financial Consolidation Process: Step by Step
The financial consolidation process begins by gathering financial data from all relevant entities. This can include subsidiaries and departments across the organisation. Ensuring accuracy in data collection is vital for reliable reports.
Next, intercompany transactions are eliminated. This step prevents double-counting and maintains financial statement integrity. It involves adjusting entries to reflect only external transactions.
Currency translation is often necessary. Companies operating in multiple countries convert foreign currencies. This ensures consistency in reporting.
After these adjustments, consolidated statements are prepared. The primary financial statements include the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. These provide a comprehensive financial picture.
Lastly, financial reports undergo reviews for compliance. These are checked against regulatory standards and internal controls.
The key steps in financial consolidation include:
- Data collection
- Intercompany eliminations
- Currency translation
- Preparing consolidated statements
- Compliance reviews
How to Prepare Consolidated Financial Statements in Joiin
Preparing consolidated financial statements can be complex, especially across multiple entities and data sources. Joiin turns this into a simple, repeatable workflow that brings financial, operational and non-financial data together in one place.
- Connect Your Entities: Add each company into Joiin using Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, spreadsheets or other data sources. Joiin automatically imports P&L, balance sheet and cash-flow data, giving you a consistent foundation for consolidation.
- Standardise Your Chart of Accounts: Use the Chart of Accounts mapping tool to align categories across entities. This ensures financial statements roll up cleanly at group level, regardless of how each entity structures its books.
- Include Non-Financial Data: With Joiin’s Non-Financial Data features, you can bring operational metrics into the same reporting environment, headcount, locations, revenue per unit, occupancy, project KPIs and more. This lets you create richer consolidated reports that combine financial and operational insights.
- Enter Inter-company Eliminations: Create adjustment journals or upload a CSV to remove inter-company sales, loans and transfers. Eliminations ensure your consolidated view remains accurate and avoids double-counting.
- Set Ownership and Minority Interests: If entities are only partially owned, set their ownership percentage in Joiin. Reports automatically adjust for non-controlling interests, giving you a true consolidated picture.
- Run Your Consolidated Reports: Generate consolidated P&L, balance sheet, cash-flow, KPIs and custom layouts. You can view group totals or break reporting down by company, region or segment. Export to Excel, PDF or build branded report packs in minutes.
Build Deeper Insights with Joiin Intelligence (AI Assist)
Joiin Intelligence analyses your consolidated data and provides instant commentary, variance explanations and anomaly detection. It highlights trends across entities and flags areas that need attention, removing guesswork and speeding up decision-making.
Extend Your Data Stack with Joiin Connect (API)
With Joiin Connect, you can push consolidated data into BI tools such as Power BI or Tableau, or pull data from other systems into Joiin. The API means you can integrate Joiin directly into your wider reporting, data and automation stack.
The Result
Joiin delivers fast, accurate, audit-ready consolidated statements, enhanced with non-financial data, AI-driven insights and flexible integrations. It’s everything finance teams need to move from manual consolidation to real-time, intelligent reporting.
