Setting Up a Consolidation Reporting Structure

The system allows you to set up or modify the hierarchical structure of your entities and sites. We recommend that you carefully plan the relationship between entities and sites before using the system. We suggest that you contact our Consulting Services group to help with your implementation.

If you modify an existing consolidation reporting structure, historic data will not change.

For additional information, see the Consolidation Overview.

Prerequisites:

Appropriate replication rules must be set up between the sites and entities.
Sites must have the same base (domestic) currency as the entity they will report to. If a chart of accounts or accounting periods have been set up at the site, they must match those established for the entity.

Following is the typical process:

Log in to each site whose Reports To entity will be set or changed.
If general ledger activity has been performed at the site, do the following. (If this is a new site with no activity, skip to the next step.)
- Post all journals and consolidate the ledger for transactions in the current site. Run the Ledger Consolidation activity at each site to calculate the ending balances for every account number at the site and consolidate them up through the old entity hierarchy.
- Since the full account balances will be closed out and moved, any balances that are to remain in the old structure must be manually transferred to other sites by journal entries in both sites. Those journal entries must be posted and consolidated.
Run the Change Reports To Entity utility at each site that you are changing to report to a new entity.
- If this utility is run at a site, you can only change Reports To Entity to a financial entity that has the same base (domestic) currency, chart of accounts and accounting periods. Also, the system verifies that all accounts defined at the site already exist at the financial entity. If this validation fails, the change is not allowed and a report is created detailing the failures.
- If chart records exist at the site that do not exist at the entity, you can use the Multi-Site Chart Copy Utility to copy the site's Chart of Accounts to the financial entity.
If no chart of accounts or accounting periods have been set up yet at the site, this Change Reports To Entity utility will copy them from the entity to the site.
If this utility is being run at a financial entity at any level, the closing balances for each account at every site beneath the financial entity are calculated and consolidated all the way up the hierarchy. Then the Reports-To value is changed. All the Reports To account mappings for the entity's Chart of Accounts must be corrected to map to the chart of accounts of the new Reports-To financial entity.
Run Ledger Consolidation (again) at each site/entity in the new structure. This consolidates the beginning balances for each account up through the new financial entity hierarchy.
The G/L Ledger references created when the process is complete are:
- SITE MOVE AWAY, which holds the closing balance.
- SITE MOVE TO, which is the beginning balance for the new Reports-To entity.
Note: No financial reporting should be run between steps 3 and 4, because the books will be temporarily out of balance.

Notes about Consolidation:

If the Change Reports To Entity utility is performed at a site (not an entity), and that site includes a replication rule for shared currency to and from the entity that it was previously reporting to, that replication rule should be deleted. Then a new replication rule for shared currency should be set up between that site and the new entity. Regenerate replication triggers and run the Manual Replication Utility for the Shared Currency category.
This ensures that users at the site will be viewing the currency records of their new financial entity instead of their old one.
The Change Reports To Entity utility can also be run if a site is sold and needs to be removed from the financial consolidation structure. In this case you would run the utility with the Reports To field blank.
The Set Ledger Consolidated Flag utility rebuilds an entity. Use it to reconsolidate entities whose data was lost, corrupted or discarded due to a complete change in corporate structure.
After running this utility, you should then run the Change Reports To Entity utility to correct the current site structure, using the option to not post the closing balances. You can then run the Ledger Consolidation activity to consolidate into the new structure. In this case, it is assumed that the entities into which you are consolidating are new and thus empty of ledger records.