Unit4 Consolidation

Streamlined, stronger and smarter group consolidation and financial performance reporting.

At a glance

Unit4 Consolidation is a powerful, highly visual and easy-to-use turnkey solution, which reconciles and combines the accounts from across a group of companies (and their various ERP, finance and other business systems) for statutory and management reporting.

It is designed from the ground up to help the group finance team measure performance and proactively support decision-making:

• Streamlined integration, input, reconciliation and control processes.
• Built-in web-services integration with Unit4 Business World and Unit4 Financials.
• Swift, automated consolidation processing and allocation handling.
• Parallel consolidation flows for multiple GAAPs, e.g. local GAAP and IFRS.
• Multi-dimensional reporting and analysis tools.

A better solution

Unit4 Consolidation helps organizations to improve both the efficiency of their financial performance management processes and the quality of numbers and analysis.

• Delivering top-to-bottom visibility
  Unit4 Consolidation is built from the ground up for better transparency and control: This full transparency and audit trail, is of huge value to the CFO and group finance team enabling you to deliver a “single version of the truth” from which to advise and support the business with clearer financial insights for decision-making and strategy execution.
  • Combining data from multiple sources and systems.
  • Leveraging it through a common information model and built-in business data logic.
  • Maintaining a tight link back from high-level financial key performance indicators (KPIs) down to the source operational and transactional data.
• Driving smarter, more streamlined consolidation
  Automation is at the heart of our solution’s power and its appeal for users. Its inbuilt, predefined consolidation logic drives best-practice reconciliation, transparency and legal reporting, handling multiple accounting standards and regulations.
• Bridging information barriers
  Unit4 Consolidation overcomes the challenges of fragmented IT structures. It pulls together all the financial and non-financial, statistical, legal and operational dimensions from across a group into one flexible, yet standardized, common information model.
• Producing better results
  Embedded, self-service, performance reporting and analysis frees and empowers your team. It provides powerful visualization and presentation tools that you can easily set up yourself and achieve great results – without being dependent on expert technical support or consultancy.

Unit4 Consolidation gives transparency in numbers and analysis, from the annual report, cash flow statement and management reports down to the transactional level, by legal entity, and/or by each operational dimension – such as business area, product and department.

KEY ADVANTAGES

Unit4 helps group finance teams deliver more efficient, automated financial consolidation for a fast close and swift delivery of financial statements and cash flow analysis. It also enables tighter control and clearer visibility of the legal and operational issues behind financial performance.

Beating the challenges of consolidation!

Unit4 Consolidation overcomes the many obstacles that can complicate and slow group accounting and reporting:

• Freeing the group finance team from unreliable spreadsheet-based solutions.
• Empowering you to deliver better insights and control without depending on IT and technical assistance.
• Bringing together all the strands of your organization’s accounts more efficiently.
• Providing a fast, reliable, consistent way to consolidate data from a variety of separate (often mutually incompatible) accounting systems.
• Incorporating processes and systems inherited from mergers and acquisitions.
• Enabling better collaboration across the business and a more rapid response to the issues and opportunities identified.

Keeping you ahead of change

Our solution’s flexibility and scalability mean it is easily adaptable for times of business change, such as mergers and acquisitions or business restructuring. Coping with multiple ERP and other source systems is no longer a problem – data input can be automated for both statutory and management reporting, thanks to the import module’s user-friendly, wizard-driven setup, which minimizes the need for complex import mapping or specialist programming skills.

A smarter, more streamlined solution

The secret to our solution’s user-friendliness is its built-in consolidation logic, which automates and speeds up processes to free your time for more strategic business decision-making. All main processes are pre-defined, with embedded rules, procedures and techniques that have been exhaustively used, verified and refined, to ensure best practice is followed and consistency achieved. Now you can consolidate income statements and balance sheets, and produce business ratios and other operational data, without any worries about the quality of the numbers.

A simpler, more focused approach

Unit4 Consolidation supports both local GAAPs and IFRS and it makes the handling of complex accounting standards straightforward and transparent. This is achieved without any time-consuming setup, as the “logic” is already in the code. The system provides user-friendly functions for input and reconciliation, in every step of the consolidation flow. You will be able to fully explain the group value, with full audit trail and easy drill-down to each transaction in the group.

Giving you the full picture

Unit4 Consolidation enables full audit trail and drill-back, and includes a powerful report generator and a unique MS Office add-in to work directly in Excel, Word or PowerPoint. It gives the Office of the CFO a 360-degree view of the business (and beyond) to help you deliver key financial insights for strategy execution. And it provides the planning and forecasts, financial scenarios and what-if analysis, to react faster to constant business change and to comply with new regulatory requirements for increased transparency and more frequent reporting.

Key capabilities

Input, reconciliation and control

• Automated import from ERP systems.
• Web services integration and smart mapping from Unit4 Business World or Unit4 Financials.
• Powerful “calculated accounts” facility.
• Customizable input templates for monthly, quarterly and yearly report packages.
• Inbuilt process for matching, reconciliation and elimination of intercompany transactions.
• Visual status reporting that ensures full process control.
• Audit trail and reconciliation of reported data – including drill-down capabilities.

Consolidation