At a Glance

Multi-company reporting in Business Central lets businesses consolidate financial data from multiple entities into one place, reducing errors and manual work. With features for currency handling, intercompany eliminations, and consolidated reporting, BC simplifies complex group finances. Brookland Solutions supports setup, optimisation, and advanced reporting tools like Power BI and Jet Reports.

What is Multi-Company Reporting in Business Central?

If you run multiple business entities or operate in different countries, you already know the uphill task of managing and reporting your finances. Each entity can have its own currency, tax setup, and chart of accounts. Gaining a full view of your accounts can mean going through a process that is error-prone and complex.

It can complicate things further if your business still relies on spreadsheets and legacy tools for reporting to group companies. This process is not only time-consuming but also makes reporting harder, which can be irksome at month-end or year-end.

But using multi-company reporting in Business Central (BC) brings the financial data of all your business units into a single set of financial reports. This allows you to access built-in features that let you manage and consolidate entries from multiple companies in a simpler way. Explore the various features and approaches to simplify multi-company reporting in this ERP and overcome common challenges.

Common Challenges in Multi-Entity Reporting

Here are the common challenges your business may face when consolidating reporting data:

  • Ensuring data is uniform across your multiple business entities
  • Managing transactions between business units
  • Errors in formulas or currency conversions can distort outcomes
  • Inaccurate data puts your business at risk and trouble meeting accounting standards and compliance requirements
  • Manual consolidation takes longer, delays board meetings and decision-making
  • Reduce the manual effort of copying and pasting data across spreadsheets and external tools

Multi-company reporting in Business Central consolidates the financials of all your companies into one set of financial reports and includes:

  • Balances from general ledger accounts
  • Currency adjustments for reporting
  • Shared Dimensions (like cost centres or departments)
  • Intercompany eliminations

When configured correctly, Business Central’s features also allow you to consolidate financial information from business units that operate in different countries, use different currencies, or follow different fiscal calendars.

Simplifying Multi-Company Reporting in Business Central

Here’s how you can maximise BC’s capabilities to simplify multi-company reporting within the ERP.

1. Create Each Business Unit in Business Central

First, identify parent and subsidiary companies. Next, create each business subsidiary or division with its own chart of accounts, currency, and fiscal year. 

2. Set up a Consolidation Company

In this step, you’re setting up a dummy company used solely for consolidating financial data. It doesn’t have to post any transactions, but it can do so if required, and is primarily used for receiving data.

3. Map Chart of Accounts

Here, you need to make sure the accounts in each company correctly map to the chart of the consolidation company. 

4. Define Exchange Rates

This step is important, especially if your business operates from multiple regions and uses multiple currencies. In this step, input your daily, monthly, and average exchange rates for all currencies. You can automate currency revaluation to make sure your reports are accurate.

5. Intercompany Transactions & Eliminations

Internal sales, loans or cost allocations make up intercompany transactions that need to be properly recorded to avoid being counted twice. BC allows you to process intercompany transactions as well as eliminate reporting entries that exclude intra-group transactions. 

Completing this process may require external tools or apps, which Brookland’s team can help you with.

6. Import Financial Data

Finally, run the built-in consolidation function. You can run this monthly or quarterly as required.

7. Generate Consolidated Financial Reports

Once you’ve completed the configuration, your finance teams generate consolidated income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow reports. You can also use Power BI for visually appealing reports. You can reduce manual intervention by automating the consolidation process.

Common Use-Cases

  • Companies with multi-national entities sharing HR operations
  • E-commerce business with multiple brands

While Business Central innately supports this workflow, some steps, like mapping, currency setup, and intercompany eliminations, can be complex and need to be configured carefully or require external expertise. Though BC supports basic consolidation features, larger or more complex businesses may need additional add-ons or custom report designs for complete financial compliance and reporting.

If you find it difficult to set up consolidation to simplify reporting in Business Central, know that Brookland Solutions is here to help. Receive timely support from our team when you partner with us for Business Central support services.

Tools and Extensions to Simplify Multi-Company Reporting

Power BI

Power BI provides up-to-the-minute analytics for your financial teams to access data whenever. It includes data visualisation tools to visualise business data quickly and gain intelligence and insights.

Your teams can also make the most of its built-in AI capabilities and Excel integrations.

Jet Reports

A flexible solution integrated within BC, Jet Reports allows you to pull data from your database and display it within Excel. It works by querying a database using Excel-like functions and returning real-time results into Excel.

How Brookland Solutions Helps

Whether you need to set up data consolidation in BC or are looking for external tools and extensions that simply provide multi-company reporting, Brookland Solutions can help.

We’re a longstanding Microsoft Silver Partner specialising in Business Central implementation and setup, consulting, and support. We offer end-to-end services and support to help you make the most of your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central subscription.

In addition to streamlining multi-company reporting, we can also help you with setting up and managing Making Tax Digital, Group Making Tax Digital, Document Management, and GDPR compliance.

Connect with us today over a consultation to learn how we can ease Business Central multi-company reporting for your business.