After you have completed your initial set-up, you are ready to start running consolidations. This workflow functions very similar to the Opening Balance Sheet workflow as you are using the app to extract period financials from your subsidiary QBO companies and posting a period consolidation journal entry, by subsidiary company into your parent QBO company.
HOW IT WORKS
- To perform a consolidation for a fiscal period, select Period Consolidation on the workflow panel
- STEP 1 (PERIOD SELECTION)- Select the period you need to consolidate. Your options include:
- fiscal month (i.e. calendar month in QuickBooks)
- fiscal quarter, as defined by the fiscal calendar of the parent
- fiscal year, as defined by the fiscal calendar of the parent
- When you select a consolidation period, any connected subsidiary company that has balance activity in that period will immediately display in the workflow matrix table
- 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 display in trial balance like format of what was extracted from the underlying QBO company for that subsidiary. The beginning balance, period activity and ending balances are all displayed in DR(CR) format
- The table on the right side is a display of the extracted period activity 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
- 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
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 you selected
- If Class IDs are used in the QBO subsidiary companies, you will see Class IDs carry across when the consolidation journals are booked into your QBO Parent company
- 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:
- #CONS-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 PRIOR PERIODS FOR BALANCE CHANGES
- If you need to re-consolidate a prior period due to a balance change in a subsidiary company and/or a COA mapping change;
- 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 Period Consolidation workflow in JustConsolidate
- Select the desired period and the subsidiary(s) to re-consolidate and and re-run the extract and review workflows to post the new consolidation journal(s)
- Remember, if you are re-posting translated balances for a subsidiary company, 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