RSMUS.comIf you’re running a multi-location or multi-entity business, you face unique accounting challenges like decentralized payables and inter-entity transactions. With so many moving parts to consider, consolidation is critical for gaining visibility into your financial performance. Adopting a more streamlined approach to consolidation can help you build a more successful and sustainable business.
Financial Consolidation for Multi-Entity Businesses
Financial consolidation is especially important for multi-entity businesses. It can help you gain visibility into the overall health of your business, get a pulse on the financial performance of each individual entity, and answer critical business questions in real time, like:
- What is my net income for the month?
- How am I doing on expenses?
- How does each location or entities’ financial performance compare?
- What is my total worth?
Unfortunately, many accounting softwares don’t support consolidation within their platforms. This poses a major problem for multi-entity or multi location businesses like restaurants or family offices. Many are forced to undergo the painful process of exporting financials into Excel and manually consolidating on a monthly basis.
Sound familiar? That’s okay! It’s perfectly normal to experience these type of growing pains as your business evolves. Your needs are changing and your current tech stack might not be capable of keeping up.
See how RSM helped one multi entity business successfully transition from Quickbooks to Sage Intacct.
For my multi-entity clients who are struggling with consolidation, I recommend Sage Intacct—a powerful cloud accounting software that can consolidate 100’s of entities in real time. You can literally click a button and receive your monthly consolidated report. It’s like magic.
Here are just a few of my favorite Sage Intacct benefits for multi-entity businesses:
Reduced User Error
If you’ve been consolidating your financials in Excel, you can probably remember a time when you made a small typo in Excel that lead to hours of additional work. Sage Intacct’s automated financial consolidation tools make things much easier. You’ll eliminate manual effort and increase your accuracy.
Saves Time & Resources
One client of mine was spending 40+ hours a month on consolidated reporting before they made the switch to Sage Intacct. Ouch. Imagine what you and your team could get done with that much extra time in your week. Many businesses also find that they have the freedom to consolidate their accounting department with all of the time saved.
Freedom to Focus on Company Growth
With all that time saved, imagine how much easier it will be to shift your focus to, well, your actual job. As a business owner, you should be focusing your effort and attention around the core business and growing the company. The same goes for your accounting staff who should be spending their time reviewing reports, not building them. Sage Intacct allows your team to shift their focus away from manual number crunching and towards the bigger picture business strategy.
Let’s say you’re running a successful family office with multiple entities. Perhaps you’re managing multiple businesses along with a foundation, a home, a yacht and a plane that you charter. Your accounting staff runs separate Quickbooks files for each entity because you’re treating them as separate businesses. But what if you want to answer the question, “What is my total worth?” The only way to find the answer is through consolidation, and there’s no way to automate that process within Quickbooks.
With Sage Intacct, you can house all of these businesses in one system and eliminate the manual consolidation for good. Interested in learning more? Get in touch with our team today to see a demo of Sage Intacct and learn more about how RSM can help with a quick and easy implementation.
