JustConsolidate

When to use this workflow

Skip this step if your consolidated financials will start from the earliest period of activity across all your entities.

Use this workflow if you want your consolidated reporting to begin in a later period. Here's why it's needed: JustConsolidate's period consolidation workflows consolidate period activity, not ending balances. So if you're starting consolidated reporting mid-stream, you'll need to load an opening balance sheet for each subsidiary first, then run the period consolidation workflows from there.

How it works

To consolidate an opening balance sheet, click Opening Balance Sheet on the workflow panel and follow the steps below.

Step 1 — Select the opening period

Choose the calendar year and month you want consolidated financials to begin. The first month of your fiscal year is recommended.

What you need to know: To create an opening balance sheet position, the system extracts balances from the period prior to the period you enter. For example, if you want consolidated financials to begin in January 2023, enter January 2023 — JustConsolidate will extract balances from December 2022. P&L accounts will also be extracted and reduced to one Debit(Credit) balance that will be pushed into retained earnings. Think of this approach as a typical year-end closing of the accounts to prepare for the next fiscal year.

With your desired period selected, click Lock OBAL Period.

Step 2 — Extract subsidiary balances

Click Run Workflow in the Extract Subsidiary Balances column to pull account balance details from each subsidiary. You can select all to run the extract across every subsidiary at once.

Step 3 — Review and post

For each subsidiary, click Review. You'll see two side-by-side tables:

Left side — Subsidiary trial balance, as extracted:

• Balance sheet accounts reflect the ending balance in the period prior to your opening period
• All P&L account activity is summed into a single DR/CR balance and shown as Net Income, which will post to retained earnings in the consolidation entity

Right side — Parent-formatted consolidation entry:

• The extracted balances reformatted into the consolidation entity's COA (based on your mappings)
• Displayed as a traditional DR/CR trial balance — this is the consolidation journal entry that will post to your consolidation entity
• The retained earnings balance shown here is the sum of the subsidiary's retained earnings and extracted Net Income

Click Confirm & Post to post the consolidation entry to your consolidation entity

Step 4 - Repeat for each subsidiary

Other information

1. Foreign currency subsidiaries

All balance sheet accounts in the opening balance sheet are translated at the period-end rate for the extract period. After posting, you may need to manually adjust some translated balances to reflect historical exchange rate differences.

To adjust: Post the opening balance sheet entry to your consolidation entity, then open the posted entry directly in your accounting platform and modify the affected balances. Offset your adjustment to the CTA account or the appropriate gain/loss account, as needed.

2. Consolidation entry posting details

• Each entry posts with the subsidiary's name in the reserved dimension that identifies which subsidiary the balances came from
• Entries are dated the last day of the fiscal period prior to your opening period
• Entry names begin with OB followed by the entity's unique identifier, so opening balance entries are easy to find later

3. Consolidated reporting

Once you've posted consolidation entries for every subsidiary, the rest of your consolidation and reporting work happens directly in your consolidation entity.

• Adjusting entries — Book intercompany eliminations, minority interest adjustments, and other consolidation entries directly in the consolidation entity. Consider tagging them with a dedicated value so they're easy to separate from your subsidiary-sourced balances.
• Segmented reporting — P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow reports can be filtered by your dimensions, giving you both segmented and consolidated views.

4. Re-consolidating the opening balance sheet

Need to redo your opening balance sheet? Just re-run the workflow. This is useful when:

• A subsidiary's balances have changed
• You've updated COA mappings
• You want to change the opening period

The system will automatically detect and remove the original entry before posting the updated one.

5. Potential error on posting: Retained Earnings not found

When posting the opening balance sheet, JustConsolidate looks for a Retained Earnings account in your consolidation entity to post the brought-forward balance to. If it can't find one, posting stops and you'll see an error.