The finance team of a group operating across India and the Gulf came to us with a problem that showed up most painfully at year-end. Each entity kept its own books, in its own currency, on systems that did not talk to one another. Consolidation was a multi-week effort built on a fragile master spreadsheet, intercompany balances rarely agreed across the boundary, and by the time the group numbers were ready, nobody had much appetite to interrogate them.
They wanted a single ERP that could carry every entity in its own local currency for statutory purposes while rolling up to a group view they could actually defend. The complication was not the currencies — it was the intercompany discipline underneath them.
A consolidation is only as trustworthy as the intercompany entries it has to eliminate.
The challenges we had to solve
- Each entity reporting in its own local currency, needing a clean translation to a single group currency without losing the statutory view.
- Intercompany transactions booked inconsistently on each side, so eliminations never netted to zero and someone had to chase the difference by hand.
- Different statutory and tax requirements either side of the boundary, which the structure had to respect rather than flatten.
- A consolidation process that lived entirely outside any system, and so could not be reviewed or trusted.
How we approached it
We designed the entity and currency structure so that each company posts and reports in its own local currency, with translation to the group currency handled by the system on defined rates rather than by hand at the end. That settled the mechanics. The harder work was agreeing one way to book intercompany transactions across every entity, so that what one side recorded as a payable the other recorded as the matching receivable, and the elimination simply worked.
We then moved the eliminations and the consolidation logic into the ERP itself, where they could be reviewed and repeated, instead of living in a spreadsheet only one person understood. We proved it against prior periods first, reconciling the system’s group numbers back to the consolidations the team had already signed off, until the two agreed.
Where it stands
The group close now runs inside one system, in a fraction of the elapsed time, with intercompany balances that reconcile rather than get explained away. Each entity still meets its own statutory obligations, and the consolidated view is something the finance team will defend in a board meeting rather than caveat.