Consolidation

Also see Articles > Multi-company Accounting.

It is possible to report across multiple branches of a single entity within a single instance of Aqilla. Where they are part of the same company, one simply uses analysis on documents / journals to identify to which branch any particular transaction relates. 

In order to deal with multiple business units or legal entities, multiple companies (in effect an unlimited number) can be set up in Aqilla.  The majority of the Aqilla customer base do have more than one company and usually each statutory organisation has it's own P&L and Balance Sheet and is therefore set up as it's own instance in order to allow unique configuration such as chart of accounts, debtor / creditors, reporting and VAT regime etc.

To consolidate data from multiple companies, there are several ways to do this:

• Push data to a consolidated Group instance and use separate Ledgers to report from within Aqilla across multiple entities. This works best where the chart of accounts is consistent across companies such that direct comparatives and calculations can be configured as specific columns and rows in Financial Reports under Configuration (similar to reporting against Budgets, Forecasts and Commitments). The benefit of this approach is that users get to make use of reports set up in Aqilla at any time from anywhere without the overhead of engineering what can often turn out to be quite complex spreadsheets. It keeps the data secure 'inside' the database and furthermore provides the flexibility of reporting on a consolidated basis over multiple periods. For simple consolidations it may be practical to use one of the existing instances to consolidate "into". Aqilla supports consolidating from different base currencies as well as from foreign currencies.

• Report on a consolidated basis using Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet - This is probably the more common of the approaches given the propensity of people that use Excel extensively.  In essence you either use the native Excel exports of the P&L and Balance Sheet reports as the basis for your consolidation (the advantage of this approach is that most of the data will be exported as ‘ready made’ balances in a format more likely to be required in a consolidated report).

• Depending on the level of supporting details required outside of the core accounting / finance reports use the Aqilla Excel Add-In (if installed it appears on the main Excel menu) and allows the user to connect a spreadsheet to a single given Aqilla company instance. This will pull out data at a transaction level and additional work is required to get to a final consolidated balance. Data security is maintained at all times with the Excel Add-In due to secure login at connection time.

• Use SharperLight to report across multiple databases and potentially create import journals for import through the Aqilla add-in, thus creating transactions for one consolidated company.