Plenty of non-profit professionals who use Intacct are managing the financials of the organization with multiple offices, locations, and/or entities. Aggregating organizational data from multiple locations can be challenging without a modern financial consolidation tool. We know that as data continues to grow in amount and importance to making crucial decisions, more executive teams will be shopping for the best solution to enable their business end users to consolidate information into a unified financial report set or for summarized operational statements. In this article, we will focus on the feature and functionality offerings for the non-profit Intacct customer who is charged with the responsibility of consolidating data for monthly financials or yearly budgets for the parent organization.
We’ll begin by defining the term. Financial consolidation refers to the process of combining all of your different locations’ or entities’ transactional information to produce a singular set of financial statements for a parent organization. These reports are comprised of entity information and showcase the overall health of the parent organization in a very direct way. For non-profits, financial consolidations typically don’t involve eliminations for inter-organization exchanges between subsidiaries. That said, it is not abnormal for adjustments that need to be made to be done manually if you don’t have a modern consolidation tool, as well as currency conversions with diverse money types. If you’re looking for today’s best consolidation solution, it is likely that it is for one of two main reasons.

If you’re looking for a modern, automated consolidation tool, it could be for a wide variety of reasons, but there are two reasons that stand out to us – both related to age.  Some customers are choosing to move away from older products that are too simplistic to meet modern business demands, like manual Excel spreadsheet consolidations.  Others are ready to upgrade from more mature software that is too complex for business end users to manage, like Hyperion or Cognos TM1.

Recently, an accountant who manages the financials for a non-profit parent organization with Intacct spoke at the #BI360Focus15 conference about her financial consolidation responsibilities.  Since the organization is international in their efforts, she is regularly working with a team to convert currencies while following domestic and global accounting rules, like the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles adjustments (GAAP), usually referred to as IFRS to GAAP.  Some consolidation software offers in-depth analyses with sub-ledger information and is part of a comprehensive suite of Business Intelligence (BI) tools, completely integrated with other modules like ad-hoc reporting, planning, data visualizations, and BI data storage.  Let’s zoom in on financial consolidations specifically for non-profit organizations using Intacct, so you can have a head start in shopping for the right consolidation tool for your organization.

To continue learning more about financial consolidation solutions for non-profit organizations using Intacct, read the rest of this article here.