GL Consolidations using

[dbant2003]

I am wondering if anyone can give me some information about the ACCPAC product G/L Consolidations. We are needing some method to help us with our financial information that we have. The question we want to know is if G/L Consolidations is the wya we should go with ACCPAC. Currently we are using ACCPAC Advantiage Series with all modules being 5.2 versions. We are getting ready to upgrade to 5.3 but have not done so. We are also using MS SQL. The problem that we have is that we have many companies that have different Year-Ends along with many Joint Ventures that need to be consolidated into our main coporate company. It is because of our structure that makes it very difficult to report on our financial position on a regular basis.

Can Consolidations consolidate the transactions with a structure like this? If not is there any suggestions as to which method we should go on. We have read information from SAGE and of course it is made out to be great. Would also like to know what actual users of the product have to say about it.

 

[jayconverse]

Also investigate Accpac Insights, that may fit better. It consolidates without actually making transactions. Like an OLAP cube.

Jay Converse
IT Director
Systemlink, Inc.

 

[DjangMan]

GL Consolidations will handle both differences in your chart of accounts as well as differences in year ends.

The big thing with GL consolidations is that you have to create a new Accpac company for each different level of consolidation that you need. For example if you have two companies: A and B and you want to consolidate them you have to create company C. You also have to export the transactions from A and B and import into C. GL Consol. has ways of making the export/import process simple but it must be done.

Using reporting type applications like Accpac Insights, F9 or XLBuddy will let you pull the data from your different companies without the need to maintain 'consolidation' companies. Those products, however, won't handle the differences in year-ends and COA's as gracefully.

Regards,

Django

 

[ettienne]

Are your joint ventures 100% owned - i.e. will you be consolidating at 100% or a lesser percentage. GL Consolidations only handles 100% consolidations.

 

[dbant2003]

Our joint ventures all have percentage owned less than 100%. If this is correct that it will only handle 100% owned jv's then we will need to go another route. So ettiene are you absoluely sure that it only handles 100% owned jv's. Thank you all for your thoughts.

 

[DjangMan]

One way around that would be to have account allocations set up in the consolidation companies. Thus each GL account could sent, say 60%, of it's balance to an account that represents what you don't down.

Again - yet more work...

 

[ettienne]

I designed and wrote GL Consolidations before Accpac purchased it, so I think I am sure
You have 2 options:
1. As DjangMan suggested, 'segmentise' your GL and split the ownership by GL segment, then in GL Cons you can export transactions for one GL segment. Involves extra work every month.
2. Use multicurrency to export to a dummy currency with a rate that equals your % ownership. This tends to confuse people...

I have also used a budget set in a consolidated GL, import all your company transactions into a budget set. Use a financial report to create the import files with the correct % split, or if you are able to write VBA macros then you can write some export routines.

Different year ends AND not 100% owned, that makes for nasty consolidations.

There are a couple of options available, maybe GL Cons is not the best in this case - if only for the 100% consolidation.