Group reporting: seeing several companies in one picture

Three companies, three Rivilė databases, one board. The month ends and the same ritual begins: each bookkeeper prepares their own profit and loss statement, everything is keyed into Excel, someone strips out the intercompany invoices by hand — and ten days later management finally sees how the group did last month.

The problem is not really that it takes time. The problem is that by then the numbers have aged, and fixing something in July’s results halfway through August is too late to matter.

Why group reporting is harder than it looks

At first glance it seems simple: add up the numbers from three companies and you have the group result. In practice, several things get in the way.

The charts of accounts differ. The companies were set up at different times, often by different bookkeepers. In one, “transport costs” is a single general ledger account; in another it is four. Until there is a shared mapping between them, adding the numbers produces a figure nobody can explain.

Periods close at different speeds. One company closes the month in three days, another takes two weeks. A consolidated report is only ever as current as its slowest part.

Intercompany transactions double the turnover. If one group company sold €200,000 of goods to another, that amount cannot appear in group revenue — but a straight sum puts it there.

Three ways to bring the data together

By hand in Excel. This works while there are two companies. The price is a few days every month and the assumption that nobody makes a copying mistake. The mistakes here are quiet ones: nothing announces that a row was left out.

The accounting system’s consolidation module. Tidy, provided every company in the group runs the same system on the same chart of accounts. That is rarely the case — particularly if the group grew by acquiring companies.

A shared data model in Power BI. Data is read straight from each accounting database — Rivilė, Finvalda, or several at once — and combined into a single model. The harmonisation rules are written down once, and after that the reports refresh on their own. It is the most expensive first step and the cheapest every month afterwards.

What to settle before consolidating

The technical part is rarely the hard one. The hard part is agreeing on the rules:

• An account mapping table. Every general ledger account in every company is tied to a shared group category. Built once, it becomes the group’s financial vocabulary.
• Consistent codes for divisions and product groups. Without them you cannot compare two companies against each other — only see a combined total.
• Currency. If one company does not work in euros, you need to agree which rate you use and as at when.
• A marker for intercompany transactions. Before they can be removed they have to be recognisable, which is easiest when group companies invoice each other under an agreed flag.

Intercompany transactions — where it usually goes wrong

This one is worth dwelling on, because the mistake is the expensive one. If company A sold €200,000 of goods to company B and B has not resold them yet, then at group level no sale has taken place — the goods simply moved from one warehouse to another.

Leave those transactions in and group revenue looks larger than it is, while the profit is fictional, because it contains an internal margin. The more actively the group companies trade with each other, the further the report drifts from reality.

In a data model this is solved once: intercompany documents are flagged and automatically excluded from the group figures, while remaining visible in each individual company’s own reports. The group sees a consolidated picture; each managing director still sees theirs.

What management gets out of it

Once the model is in place, “how is the group doing” stops being a project:

• revenue, costs and profit — for the whole group and for each company, in the same view;
• comparison between companies on identical measures rather than on instinct;
• a consolidated balance sheet and profit and loss statement without manual assembly;
• receivables and payables across the group, including what the companies owe each other;
• and above all, numbers that refresh on their own rather than when somebody has time.

Business analytics is worth more to a group than to a single company. The director of one company usually has a feel for their numbers without a report. The head of a group does not: without a shared model they are reading three separate stories and guessing at how those add up.

If your group runs on Rivilė or Finvalda and the month still ends in Excel, take a look at what a finished set of Power BI reports looks like — and at how much of what you do by hand the system can do for you.