6 Ways Consolidation Functionality Transforms Planning

Financial consolidation is often viewed as a standalone process for many organizations—creating unnecessary complexity and inefficiency.

A unified approach integrating financial consolidation into budgeting and planning can solve these problems. By combining these functions, organizations can streamline financial performance management to improve accuracy, efficiency, and more.

While EPM applications are designed to streamline budgeting and planning, they often overlook the importance of financial consolidation. But, by not integrating consolidation, financial workflows become inefficient and data remains incomplete, causing delays and errors.

Financial consolidation typically increases in complexity with an organization’s complexity—such as during acquisitions, international expansions, or preparing for an IPO. However, treating it separately from budgeting and planning adds to fragmentation. A unified system ensures smoother workflows and more accurate reporting, and supports the overall budgeting and planning process.

Using Consolidation Functionality in Budgeting and Planning

Financial consolidation is vital for a range of budgeting and planning scenarios. Organizations may struggle with intercompany eliminations, currency conversions, or complex allocations without it. These challenges lead to reporting delays, inaccuracies, and reliance on manual workarounds—ultimately making it harder to use your financial data to achieve business objectives effectively.

6 key areas where financial consolidation plays a crucial role include:

1. Intercompany eliminations
2. Alternate rollups and hierarchies
3. Complex allocations
4. Currency conversion scenarios
5. Journal entries on budgets
6. Auditability of budgets and forecasts

Incorporating financial consolidation functionality directly into your budgeting and planning solution ensures that your FP&A team can avoid the aforementioned challenges and deliver financial budgets, plans, and reports efficiently and that are more accurate. This eliminates manual adjustments and workarounds, helping your team focus on strategic planning with confidence.

The value of a unified solution

A unified system that integrates both financial consolidation and budgeting functionality can eliminate silos and improve visibility across the organization.

When your actuals and budget data are in the same system and format, it becomes much easier to track performance, manage exceptions, and make timely decisions based on reliable data.

With a unified solution, departments like HR, sales, and operations can collaborate more efficiently with finance and accounting teams, ensuring that data across the organization informs financial planning.

This creates a more agile organization that can respond quickly to market changes, acquisitions, and expansion opportunities.

Planful, a leader in cloud financial planning and cloud financial close solutions

Planful fully embraces the ideal of providing a unified solution for budgeting and planning, as well as financial consolidation and reporting.

Our cloud EPM platform integrates powerful financial consolidation capabilities like automated intercompany eliminations, real-time currency conversions, and comprehensive auditability—enabling organizations to improve accuracy and increase speed in their financial processes.

Unlike many other platforms, Planful’s solution seamlessly scales as your organization grows, allowing you to transition from basic budgeting to complex financial consolidation without investing in separate tools.

Not only does Planful provide complete functionality for budgeting and planning, as well as financial consolidation, our solution provides market-leading capabilities throughout. By integrating automation and AI into the consolidation process, Planful also helps finance teams and teams across the business automate repetitive tasks, improve forecasting accuracy, and prepare for future growth.

Ready to streamline your budgeting, planning, and financial consolidation processes with Planful? Try our interactive demo to get started.