Online Consolidation Method

With online consolidations, you can compare budget amounts to actual amounts for a group of business units for a specific company; you can also compare different budget ledgers, unit ledgers, and so on.

When you use online consolidations, you can consolidate business units and review account balances by:

• Category code, such as branch, office, or geographical region.

• Company, category code, and value.

  For example, you can review types of expenses by department, product type, and geographical region.

• Organizational report structure within parent/child business units.

By grouping business units, you can create consolidated trial balances, balance sheets, and income statements.

The advantages of the online consolidation method are:

• Enables you to consolidate small numbers of companies or business units.

• Includes real-time information for up-to-the-minute consolidations.

• Enables you to store criteria for future consolidations.

• Controls the calculation method for ledger comparison. For example, you can subtract budgeted amounts from actual amounts to calculate budget variances or divide budgeted amounts by actual amounts to show a budget-to-actual ratio. Four calculation options are available.

• Accesses the ledger for reviewing detail information for business units, down to the account level.

• Requires less additional disk space than the high-volume method because it creates fewer new records. Instead, it uses the existing account balance records.

• Enables you to consolidate balances that are based on multiple business unit category codes.

• Enables you to use the parent/child relationships that you create in organization report structures.

The disadvantages of the online consolidation method are:

• Provides reviewing capability only, although you can export the information to a spreadsheet for analysis.

• Causes increased processing time, based on the number of business units.