The Best Financial Consolidation Software
Aggregating financial data from various departments, subsidiaries, or portfolios can be painful. We wrote this guide to highlight tools that are life-savers when it comes to financial consolidation.
- Capable of handling complex consolidations
- Cloud-based platform is very stable
- Expands to meet changing regulations
- Versatile platform with unique data management capabilities
- Streamlined financial close and consolidation process
- In-depth reporting and analysis capabilities
- Cloud and on-premise implementation
- Spreadsheet-style interface
- Supports all types of financial and non-financial budgeting
Adding financial consolidation software to your business helps automate financial close with real-time processes. Using our review methodology, we’ve created a list of the top financial consolidation software on the market:
- CCH Tagetik: Best Overall
- OneStream: Best for EPM
1 CCH Tagetik - Best Overall
Why We Chose It: CCH Tagetik is an enterprise performance management software that includes financial consolidation tools. It unifies all of a finance organization’s processes, including budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and performance reporting. This means the software stores disclosure management data in the same database as consolidated actual and plan data, allowing for a full audit trail of all changes from consolidation through disclosure.
CCH Tagetik integrates with other software, including Excel, which allows for additional reporting options. However, this system can be highly complex, requiring users to undergo training to meet the steep learning curve.
2 OneStream - Best for EPM
Why We Chose It: OneStream is an EPM which simplifies financial consolidation, planning, reporting, analysis, and data quality for enterprises. Available in both cloud and on-premise formats, OneStream’s modular design allows for gradual software enhancements, reducing initial costs and complexity.
Key features include comprehensive financial consolidation and reporting, intercompany eliminations, and foreign exchange and cash flow reporting. Additionally, OneStream’s capabilities in financial budgeting, forecasting, and strategic planning and modeling further solidify its utility. The platform is also equipped with advanced reporting and analysis tools.
3 Prophix
Why We Chose It: Prophix is a BI and financial software application widely used for budgeting, planning, analysis, and financial consolidation. It uses a familiar spreadsheet-style interface yet is designed to overcome the limitations of traditional spreadsheets. The result is a familiar, end-to-end solution that includes budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, data mining, reporting, personnel planning, and scorecarding.
This software is particularly tailored for large organizations, offering powerful budgeting and financial reporting features. Prophix’s flexibility allows for both simple and complex data presentation, adapting to varied company requirements.
4 Planful
Why We Chose It: Planful is a cloud-based FP&A platform designed for continuous planning and financial consolidation. It forms part of an EPM suite that integrates web-based applications including budgeting, planning, forecasting, scorecarding, dashboarding, and financial consolidation. This integration allows businesses to streamline FP&A and financial close processes by automating and accelerating planning, reporting, and consolidation processes.
Planful’s approach to consolidation, driven by accounts and dimensions, simplifies the process and assures data integrity. Its powerful OLAP calculation engine enhances data analysis and consolidation accuracy.
5 Workday Adaptive Planning
Why We Chose It: Workday Adaptive Planning integrates with other applications such as SAP and Oracle to better consolidate data for accurate and efficient processing and analysis. This integration is crucial for companies working with Excel spreadsheets, as it enhances the accuracy of reports and simplifies data management.
Workday is particularly suited for medium to large scale companies, providing an array of features that streamline the financial planning process. Its capabilities include customizable dashboards, in-memory data models for faster and more scalable processing, and support for multiple forecasting models. The platform also boasts a user-friendly interface with advanced reporting features for diverse financial management needs.
6 Board
Why We Chose It: Board is a budgeting and forecasting solution which includes financial consolidation functionality. By combining the functionalities of business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM) within a single product, Board streamlines various functions such as data integration, analysis, and reporting. And the toolkit approach allows users to create sophisticated models for distribution, allocation, and reclassification without extensive technical know-how.
7 Anaplan
Why We Chose It: Anaplan, primarily focused on business intelligence, offers another option for companies seeking software for financial consolidation. This cloud-based platform incorporates the Hyperblock modeling and calculation engine to enable speedy consolidation across different locations and facilitates effective monitoring of precisely defined KPIs.
As a Connected Planning platform, Anaplan is designed to support collaborative planning, allowing various stakeholders within a business to participate actively throughout the process.
What is Financial Consolidation Software?
Financial consolidation software helps speed-up the act of making consolidated financial statements for larger, more complex companies. These companies face the issues of decentralized accounting, inter-entity transactions, dealing with multiple currencies, and more. Financial consolidation software generates financial reports and improves the audit trail of your organization through intercompany matching and eliminations.
Consolidation software automates your financial close with real-time financial consolidation processes and intercompany eliminations. It’s best used in conjunction with ERP systems other business management systems as part of a greater corporate strategy. When consolidating finances for budgeting or financial planning purposes, financial consolidation software provides a unified approach for reporting and strategizing.
Financial Consolidation Software Functionality
- Reclassifications: A financial statement reclassification is a journal entry that transfers an amount from one general ledger account to another. Account for debits vs credits and currency conversion.
- Workflow: Streamline your close process by viewing a snapshot of completed work and work that is yet to be done. Monitor which entities have unfilled tasks and still need to send their financial data to the primary financial consolidation software user.
- Management Roll-up: Map all general ledgers into a single chart of accounts for a unified and consistent global report among your entire organization.
- Financial Reporting: Create reports that let you view trends pertaining to company financials and sales. Use varieties of hierarchies, location/level/department combinations, and more to validate business performances and make key decisions to the future of the business.
Benefits of Financial Consolidation Software
The automation offered from financial consolidation software will help you shorten your month-end closing time by eliminating manually processes or workarounds from using spreadsheets like Excel. Using software reduces the hours needed to handle these tasks manually. Other benefits of financial consolidation software include:
Streamline Your Financial Consolidation Methods
Consolidation software tools provide an easy-to-use method of automating your journal entries, eliminations, and adjustments. Most solutions automate conversions in real-time and do not require batch jobs, or any other sort of long-running process, to be performed.
When it comes to international organizations, larger companies who deal with more complex multi-currency financial consolidations can take comfort knowing that currency can be automatically converted and translated into the appropriate formats upon receipt.
Compare Financials Among Varying Organization Levels
Another key benefit comes from the ability to create comparative views between different time periods or locations. Consolidation software makes it easy to bring in the financial data of each location and create comparative trial balances, receivables/payable reports, or balance sheets.
Being able to get a real-time view of reports and analytics across all your companies will let you know who is meeting goals and expectations set forth by upper management. This lets you reward locations that are performing admirably or create benchmarks for underperforming branches.
GAAP and IFRS Support
Financial consolidation software will help you conform to all activities and workflows within your financial statements in line with the latest accounting standards. The benefit of doing so is to ensure you have a more structured and streamlined way of creating balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements that combine data from multiple sources.
GAAP stands for generally accepted accounting principles, which is the accounting standard set by the U.S. securities and exchange commission. Accountants in the US will use the guidelines set forth by GAAP in their financial reporting. Multiple entities that abide by GAAP will have an easier time being able to transfer data with each other, as it will not require a large amount of legwork to reformat data into a unified set of details that can be turned into a financial report.
The European Union has a different set of guidelines called the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). These standards are issued by both the IFRS Foundation and International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) with the goal of providing a common language for business affairs. In consolidation software, this helps make finances comparable across a variety of boundaries, borders, and geographical locations.
Many consolidation software options will claim to be both GAAP and IFRS compliant. This simply means the software can present financial statements and statements of cash flows in a manner that would be approved by these reporting agencies.
