RSMUS.comSage Intacct Advanced Ownership Consolidations: A Game-Changer
Here’s a dilemma familiar to any owner (or ownership group) with less than 100% stake in an entity. When it’s time to consolidate entities, crunching the numbers to reflect partial ownership takes so much time and effort that it raises a difficult question: Have someone do the work even though it will occupy hours or days of their time, or else proceed with as few of the numbers as possible even though it undermines financial understanding and decision-making?
Neither outcome is acceptable; it’s a classic Catch-22. But not anymore.
The developers behind Sage Intacct have a long track record of listening to accountants and finance professionals to understand their real problems and biggest pain points—then turning Sage Intacct into the solution. For years now, the developers have been working on a tool to enable advanced consolidations that were finally released with the 2023 R4 update. It’s available now, and while it requires a small subscription fee, the cost more than pays for itself in time saved, stress and frustration resolved, and risk and uncertainty eliminated.
Anyone with partial ownership of something—or many things, as is often the case—will gain a whole new outlook on accounting thanks to what Sage Intacct can now accomplish.
Advanced Consolidations Made Easy
From real estate and construction to private equity, there are some industries where it’s not just common but often the norm for ownership to be split among multiple parties, often in complex ways that change over time. An accountant would traditionally have to adjust every line in the financial statement to reflect whether someone owned 75% or 15% of the entity, which was time, labor, and error-intensive, especially when it had to be repeated across multiple tiers and silos or involved foreign currencies.
Sage Intacct can now do it automatically.
Users start by defining the structure of the parent and child holding companies, including the percentage ownership at each level. The developers have thoughtfully included the ability to run a report to visualize the structure in ways that wouldn’t be easy otherwise. Furthermore, if the structure changes in the future for any reason, amending the records in Sage Intacct sends updates throughout the entire system.
Afterward, users can consolidate any entity based on the established parent and child relationships. Sage Intacct will run the required calculations and send the data where instructed, all with speed, scale, and precision. At this point, advanced consolidations run on autopilot, which has even bigger benefits than it appears.
Accountants can spend their time and energy focusing on something else; decision-makers always have the current data and clear insights they need; and accounting moves as dynamically as the rest of the company.
By automating advanced consolidations, Sage Intacct turns a weakness into a strength. Even more exciting, with the right approach, that strength doesn’t just streamline accounting but also gives competitors an edge over everyone else.
Getting More from Sage Intacct
By combining user-defined books in Sage Intacct with the new advanced consolidation feature, exciting new reporting capabilities open up. Users could, for example, run reports to understand how changes in the ownership structure affect tax liabilities, then plan to keep adequate cash on hand so that unexpected tax events don’t cause unnecessary business disruptions.
This is just one of many examples of how Sage Intacct empowers users in two ways. First, to expedite or automate the processes they like the least. Second, to make it faster and easier to access more data and better insights. In so many ways, Sage Intacct handles data management to the benefit of everyone else, from accountants to executives.
RSM helps clients capture more of those benefits and take advantage of all that Sage Intacct can do to serve their strategic objectives. To learn more about advanced consolidations, Sage Intacct, or elite (yet accessible) accounting software, reach out to RSM.
