[OAUGNet]-Re: GL Multiple Sets of Books; Translation and Consolidation

["Hariharasudhan Ramani" <hramani.off@googlemail.com>]

Kathy,

I recently worked with a client that consolidated their world wide
operations into the US Sets of books. They had close to 30 sets of
books and having all that information in the US books made is
difficult for both the US accounting team and the consolidations team.
For one, the US a/cing team couldn't close their period until
consolidations were finished with. Also, they had to define security
rules to prevent the US team from querying numbers pertaining to other
country operations. The other issue was reports - while security rules
work on most standard reports, the custom reports defined for
consolidations were not built to follow security rules. That was a
maintenance issue (additional report groups). The biggest issue they
faced was in prior period changes - whenever any entity had to make
changes to their previously reported numbers, they had to undo the
consolidation for that period, make the changes and redo the
consolidation. In doing so, they had to reopen the US/Consolidation
books time and again. During such times, they had to remove posting
capabilities for the US operations as well (to prevent inadvertent
posting into prior periods) - Another maintenance issue.

I would recommend having a separate set of books for consolidation
which saves a lot of heart burn for the two teams - even if the same
set of people are handling the US books and consolidations. Most
clients of mine have done that. Saves time on system maintenance.

As far as analyzing consolidated results before finalizing
consolidations - most clients have level 1 & level 2 consolidations.
The first one was a draft and changes were bound to come up. Then they
undid the consolidation, made the changes and consolidated the final
numbers again in level 2. Its a different thing that some clients
often went up to levels 6 or 7... but in theory they had two levels.

HTH,
Hari




On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Kathy Farmer <kathyjfarmer@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> We currently have 3 Sets of Books (USD, CAD and EUR) and are
> translating and consolidating into the USD Set of Books. We have
> future plans to bring other international entities onto Oracle which
> means 17+ additional sets of books, primarily to deal with statutory
> reporting and currency. We are contemplating whether we should have a
> separate "Consolidating" Set of Books where we consolidate everything,
> including the USD set of books. We would then do all the elims/cons in
> this "Consolidating" set of books.
>
> We are curious about what other companies with similar situations have done.
>
> In addition, how do other companies handle the need to review
> "consolidated" results and analyze "consolidated" balances before the
> individual books are actually consolidated? We have been advised to
> run translation multiple times for each of these sets of books during
> the close and push the translated balances to our management reporting
> tool (Essbase) in order to see "consolidated' results. Has anyone had
> any experience with doing this in practice?
>
> Thank you.
>
> Kathy Farmer
> RHMR
> 612-719-9435
>
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-- 
Hari Ramani

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