Use this workflow to consolidate your subsidiaries' financials for a single period, with the ability to review a trial-balance-style extract and the resulting consolidation journal entry before posting to the consolidation entity.
If you'd rather skip the per-entity review and post everything in one click, use the Multi Period Consolidation workflow instead. You can still use Single Period Consolidation later to look up the extract details for any period that's already been posted.
How it works
Step 1 — Select the period
Choose the fiscal month you want to consolidate. Periods are calendar months in both QuickBooks Online and Xero, so a fiscal month maps to the calendar month it falls in.
Once you select a period, any connected subsidiary with balance activity in that period will appear in the workflow matrix table.
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:
- Beginning balance, period activity and ending balance shown in DR/CR format
Right side — Parent-formatted consolidation entry:
- The extracted period activity 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
Click Confirm & Post to post the consolidation entry to your consolidation entity
Step 4 - Repeat for each subsidiary with period activity to consolidate.
Consolidation entry details
- Each entry is tagged with the subsidiary it came from, using a dimension value that JustConsolidate creates in your consolidation entity automatically
- Entries are dated the last day of the fiscal period you selected
- Entry names begin with PD followed by the entity's unique identifier, so period consolidation entries are easy to find later
- Dimension values used in your subsidiaries carry over to the consolidation entries
Where those details live differs by platform:
| QuickBooks Online | Xero | |
| Subsidiary name is tagged in | Division (Location) | Category 1 (Entity) |
| Subsidiary dimension values carry over as | Class, carried across as-is | Category 2, following your Category Mapping settings |
| Entry name appears in | Journal entry name, using the Realm ID | Manual journal narration, using the Tenant ID |
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.
- Segmented reporting — P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow reports can be filtered by your dimensions, giving you both segmented and consolidated views.
- 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.
For Xero users Xero's Profit and Loss supports tracking categories as columns, so you can show every entity side by side in one report. The Balance Sheet supports a tracking filter rather than columns, so you can run it for one entity at a time but not with every entity shown alongside. |