Consolidation Overview

You can consolidate your financial data from several sites for timely reporting and online queries.

Entities

In a multi-site environment, you can specify a hierarchy of financial entities that operating sites report to. A financial entity is a level of business operation for which there is:

A complete set of financial statements,
Its own domestic currency code, which must be shared by sites that report to it, and its own currency rates, which may or may not be shared by reporting sites/entities.
Its own account template, chart of accounts, and accounting periods, which must be shared by reporting sites. (Reporting entities do not have to share these characteristics.)

Each entity is implemented in a separate database, which allows no business activity aside from period, chart and currency maintenance, and the reporting of its consolidated ledger and budgets. Users of the entity database should all belong to the default authorization group Entity Forms, which limits them to using only entity-level forms.

If ledger detail is replicated to the entity from the sites, you may be able to view detail down to the level of the originating transaction. (This assumes that any other categories required for the transaction-level detail are also being replicated. Having this level of G/L and other transaction detail replicated to the entity generally does not make sense from a performance standpoint.) Otherwise, you will need to access the specific site database in order to view the transaction detail.

Sites Reporting to an Entity

The majority of operations at sites reporting to an entity remain the same as at a non-reporting site, including the financials. If a site reports to an entity, the site's Chart of Accounts is now owned by the entity and copied from it. In the local copy of the Chart of Accounts, you can delete records to use a subset of the accounts. The site must use the domestic currency of its entity, but it may use its own rates. Consolidation utilities must be run at the reporting sites to copy the posted ledger transactions and budgets into the entity databases all the way up the hierarchy.

A site is not required to report to an entity, in which case its financials are not consolidated.

Setup of Entities and the Reporting Structure

When you create system databases, you must specify a Database Type. For an entity database, select Initialized Application Database (unless you are upgrading from an older version and will just be loading in existing entity data - in that case, select Empty Application Database). Specify a Site Type of Entity.

Operational data such as entry or selection of customers and vendors is not necessary for entity databases.

Defining the Hierarchy

To define or change the hierarchy of your sites and entities, several tools are available:

Change Reports to Entity: Use this utility at the reporting site/entity to specify the next-level entity to which this site/entity reports.
Multi-Site Chart Copy: Use this utility at the entity to copy the Chart of Accounts to the reporting sites/entities.
Ledger Consolidation: Use this utility at the reporting site/entity to consolidate all previously unconsolidated records for the site, all the way up the financial reporting hierarchy.

Note: Additional steps are required in order to initially set up a financial hierarchy. We suggest that you contact Infor Consulting Services to help with your implementation.

It is not necessary to have a balanced financial hierarchy.

Changes to Your Reporting Structure

Over time, sites come and go and the hierarchy of entities may change. As these changes occur, the historical consolidated financial data will not change, and an historical time-phased site/entity structure will be maintained. This allows prior period reporting and drill-downs to yield identical results, even after the structure has changed. On the date of a reporting structure change, a large transaction is posted to close out all accounts for all selected subordinate sites, computing the account balance of each account. Half of this transaction is immediately consolidated to the existing structure, effectively zeroing the balances from the books. After the hierarchy is changed, the other half of the transaction is consolidated to the new structure, creating opening balances for all the accounts. At the site level, this has no effect, since a debit and credit for the same amount is posted to the same account on the same date.

Be aware of the following when changing the reporting hierarchy:

Financial statement reporting at entities only shows data for transactions that occurred during the time period that the hierarchy was in place.
When you change an entity's Reports To mapping, there is no historical audit trail of how it was formerly set up.
Transactions are consolidated to the current structure only, regardless of effective date of the hierarchy change or the ledger transaction date.

Note: Sites can only report to entities that have matching reporting parameters. This includes the same chart template, domestic currency and financial periods, as well as every Chart of Accounts already defined at the entity.

Currency

When dealing with multiple currencies in a consolidated environment:

The base (domestic) currency must be the same at all sites reporting to an entity. However, you may set up the sites so they can maintain their own currency exchange rates - or you may want to maintain the rates only at the entity.
In each entity's Chart of Accounts, the currency translation method and the exchange rate type are specified for each account.
The currency table of the entity is the one used for translation during the consolidation. (Sites use the domestic currency of their entity, so there is no currency translation at this level.)

Combined vs. Consolidated Reporting

Financial statements can either show combined data from a group of sites, or consolidated data from an entity and its reporting sites.

If you want to create sample financial statements before changing a hierarchical structure, to see what the combined data from multiple sites will look like, you can mimic the new structure by using multi-site group IDs and combined financial statements. For more information, see Combined Financial Statements.

Even after you have set up a consolidated environment, you may still run combined financial statements for a group of sites.

When you run consolidated financial reports from the entity, all sites that report to the entity must have run the Ledger Consolidation utility. When the financial statement is run, no currency translation is required, because the data at the entity level is already translated into the entity's currency and Chart of Accounts. Also, since no multi-site group IDs are specified, it looks only at the information in the entity's database. Therefore, consolidated financial reports run much faster than combined financial reports.

Unit Code Mapping

Each unit code is copied to the Reports To entity verbatim if that account in the Reports To entity has the unit code enabled.

Budget Consolidation

Use the Budget Consolidation utility at the reporting site/entity to consolidate all previously unconsolidated site budgets and plans through the cutoff date. All entities in the hierarchy that are senior to the current site must be replicating G/L or Ledger Consolidation data with the current site. Each budget and plan for each account is consolidated all the way up the hierarchy; the budget and plan at the current site remains unchanged. For higher level entities, the newly created budgets and plans are stored using that entity's chart of accounts, base currency, and financial periods.

If a site or entity enters and leaves a hierarchy in the course of a single year, the original budget/plan will be replaced with the later one.