Use this workflow to consolidate your opening balance sheet in your parent QBO Company if you desire to have consolidated financials beginning in a period other than the true first period of transaction across all your companies. Otherwise, you can skip this workflow use the Period Consolidation workflow beginning with the very first period of transaction across all your companies.


HOW IT WORKS

  • To perform a consolidation of your opening balance sheet for a fiscal period, select Opening Balance Sheet on the workflow panel


  • STEP 1 (PERIOD SELECTION)- Select the period you want your consolidated financials to start in:
    • Enter the calendar Year and Month
    • The system knows to extract balances from the period prior to the period you enter (eg. if you want to start consolidated financials January 2023, enter that period and the system will extract balances from the December 2022 period)
    • click the 'Lock OBAL Period' button


  • STEP 2 (EXTRACT SUBSIDIARY BALANCES) - click the 'Run Workflow' button in the Extract Subsidiary Balances column to extract the required account balance details from each of the QBO subsidiary companies. You can select all to run this workflow across all subsidiary companies


  • STEP 3 (REVIEW & POST)- for each subsidiary company, click the 'Review' button;
    • The table on the left side is simply a trial balance of what was extracted from the underlying QBO company for that subsidiary
    • Balance sheet accounts tie to ending balance in the account in the period prior to opening balance period and all P&L accounts are extracted and cumulated into single DR/CR balance and displayed as Net Income which will be posted to Retained Earnings account in the QBO Parent Company
    • The table on the right side is a display of the extracted balances now in the format of the parent company COA. The balances are displayed in a traditional DR/CR trial balance format - this is the consolidation journal entry that will be posted to your QBO parent company
    • The Retained Earnings balance in the journal posting is a combination of the Retained Earnings balance and the Net Income balance extracted from the subsidiary company
    • Click the 'Confirm & Post' button to post the Consolidation JE to your QBO parent company, otherwise you can click the 'Reviewed' button to mark that you have reviewed the JE but not ready to post it
    • Repeat the review & post step for each subsidiary company that has period activity to consolidate


  • STEP 4 - OPTIONAL  (CONFIRM & POST) - if you reviewed but did not post the consolidation JE you can then select the 'Confirm' button to again review then post the consol JE



ERROR MESSAGE - RETAINED EARNINGS MISSING OR NOT SPELLED CORRECTLY

  • If you have altered the spelling of the Retained Earnings account in your QBO parent company, this includes adding account numbers in the name field, you will see an error message telling you to restore the spelling of the Retained Earnings account to the default QBO spelling, this includes also NOT including account numbers in the name field



CONSOLIDATION JOURNAL ENTRY DETAILS

  • Journal entries are posted to the division name (location category) our system created in your QuickBooks Online parent company for each of your connected subsidiary companies
  • Journal entries are posted to the last day of the fiscal period prior to the period you selected as your opening balance period
  • To make it easy to identify the journal entries our system posts to your parent company, we use the following syntax for the journal entry number for consolidation related entries:
    • #OB-YYYY-MMM-DIVISION_NAME
    • Note that the division name may be truncated in the JE number due to Intuit defined character length limits


CONSOLIDATED REPORTING

  • When you have completed posting consolidation journals for each subsidiary, you will finish consolidation and reporting work in your QBO parent company
  • Adjusting entries to consolidated financials such as intercompany eliminations, minority interest, etc. are booked directly in your QBO parent company. You can create a division name (location value) in your QBO Parent company to segment your adjusting entries from your subsidiary financials
  • Remember, you can modify P&L's, Balance Sheets and CF reports in the QBO to filter or display by Division (location) and Class so you have complete flexibility to run segmented and consolidated reports


RE-CONSOLIDATING OPENING BALANCE SHEET

  • If you need to re-consolidate your opening balance sheets due to a  balance change in a subsidiary company and/or a COA mapping change or you want to change the opening period;
    • First, delete (in QBO) the original consolidation JE that was posted to your QBO parentco for the affected subsidiary company
    • Once the journal entry(s) have been deleted, return to the Opening Balance Sheet workflow in JustConsolidate
    • Select a new opening period if desired or simply re-run the extract and review workflows to post the new consolidation journal(s)
    • Remember, if you are re-consolidating, you must delete any prior journal entry(s) that were posted for that subsidiary company. Our system will not overwrite anything that was posted already to the parent company


CONSOLIDATION FOR A FOREIGN CURRENCY SUBSIDIARY