Consolidating Across Summary Ledgers

Processing consolidation on summary ledgers offers the following advantages:

• The process time is reduced because the volume of summary ledgers usually is much smaller than detail ledgers.

  This is especially true if you are using existing summary ledgers that you are already maintaining.

• You can achieve the purpose of consolidating business units with dissimilar charts of accounts through summarizing detail ledgers using trees.

The following are the main differences when setting up or running the consolidation process using summary ledgers:

• Whenever a ledger template needs to be specified, instead of using a detail ledger template (for example, STANDARD), use the summary ledger template of your choice (for example, S_ACTDIV).

  This includes your elimination set, minority interest set, consolidation ledger set, and consolidation set.

• Because detail ledgers are not involved, the system does create journals.

  The consolidation calculation log holds the information about how summary ledgers are updated.

• Summary ledgers used for consolidation must be up-to-date before you process the consolidation so that, for example, any last-minute journals are rolled up to the summary ledgers properly when posted to its detail ledgers.

  Summary ledgers can be incrementally updated either through journal posting or by running a separate Summary Ledger process.