This document provides an overview of accounting consolidation made easy. It discusses preparing the consolidation by defining the scope of currency and companies. It also covers building the consolidation structure through account groups, accounts, and mappings. The document notes creating analysis through period, rate, and journal definitions and monitoring the ongoing consolidation process through account mappings and charts. It concludes by mentioning tools for internal reporting, compliance, and powerful analysis through a reporting builder.
Hello everyone and welcome to this talk. I’m Cédric and I’m Business Analyst at Odoo for two years. Today, I will present you the Consolidation application with the aim to easily build your own consolidated reports.
So first of all, because the Consolidation exclusively depends on Accounting, we will start with some useful features that will help you to prepare and ease your Consolidation.
Basically, before starting the Consolidation, you could check three points.
First, make sure that your charts of accounts is clear and well defined. Preparing the Consolidation is a great opportunity to review and clean your chart of accounts. You will see later that the account mapping is the most time-consuming part of the job so we advise to rationalize the number of accounts to map.
Second, create a reliable and well defined structure of journals. During the Consolidation process, it will be easier to exclude some transactions if they are isolated in specific journals.
Third, you can use the Automatic Transfers to automatically generate some account moves. Thereby, you will be able to clean the transactions without changing the habits of your accountants. It is really a powerful feature to automate you adjustment moves.
So now as soon as your Accounting is ready, we can start the consolidation process. It will done in three steps.
First, we will define the scope of the Consolidation. It means that we will create a consolidation for some companies and we will choose the target currency. Note that you can select only one company if you want to easily create a custom report for this company.
Second, we will create the structure of the consolidation. It means we will create the consolidated accounts that will be displayed on the consolidated report. Each account could belong to a group. And the groups could be hierarchised. Thereby, the report could be structured in sections, sub-sections and so on. When this structure is set, we will map the accounts of each company with the right consolidated account. This process is the most difficult because you will have to parse each account to create an exhaustive mapping. As you can imagine, it could be very time-consuming.
Third, when your consolidated report is ready, we will use it in a defined period for which we will define the period, the consolidation rate of each company and the journals to exclude from the report.
Let’s practice this by building our first consolidated report, for example a generic Profit & Loss
[DEMO]
Now you are able to create your own consolidated reports. Let’s see how you can go further.
As a cross-company tool, the Consolidation application allows you to keep your eyes on the charts of accounts of each company. Odoo displays the lists of unmapped accounts for each consolidation you created.
Next, you can exclude your intercompany transaction by excluding the dedicated IC accounts from the mapping. Moreover, you can exclude some journals too. As I said previously, that’s why it is very important to work on a reliable Accounting structure.
When your consolidated Balance Sheet is perfectly built, you can easily identify the CTA. It is just the residual amount on your consolidated report. So your gains or losses coming from the currencies are well isolated in the difference cell.
The consolidation app will give you the ability to be compliant with accounting standards. So you can create your own reporting that will meet the principles implemented in IFRS, US GAAP and so on. However, Odoo does not provide any guidelines regarding the accounting standards. So you will have to create your own rules and to respect them.
Finally, the Consolidation application allows you to create compliant reports but you can use it to create your custom reports. It does not require any technical skills and it is really easy to define your scope, to create a clear structure and to analyze your data within a period. So you can use the Consolidation as a powerful reporting builder.
So thanks for your attention. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate !