Sage Pastel • Overview on Consolidating Companies

Overview on Consolidating Companies

 

In the File…Consolidate menu option you can consolidate one or more companies into a new, consolidated company.

 

You need to choose companies which are to be consolidated.

 

• You select a company to consolidate by double-clicking its directory (folder) name in the first list box, or by dragging it, using the right mouse button, to the second list box.
• You de-select a company in the second list box using the same methods.

 

The consolidated company is not a normal company which you create in Pastel. For one thing, although it contains balances, it does not contain transactions. For this reason, you cannot run a data integrity check on a consolidated company.

Depending on the degree of synchronicity in the original companies, it is also possible that the trial balance and / or balance sheet in the consolidated company does not balance.

WHAT YOU CAN DO IN A CONSOLIDATED COMPANY IS:

• Print standard financial statements, and/or use the report writer to print custom reports. One useful feature of the report writer in this respect is that you can copy reports from another company. This is important because Pastel creates the consolidated company as a new company, and you do not want to have to re-create custom reports each time.
• Adjust the values in the consolidated company via journal entries. Remember, however, that there is no on-going link between the original companies and the consolidated company. You may, therefore, prefer to create any journals in the original companies, and then to re-consolidate.

You need to be aware of some issues as far as consolidating companies are concerned:

• Pastel consolidates general ledger and budget balances.

 

No transactions are created, and no sub-ledgers are consolidated. The consolidated company can be used to generate financial reports.

 

• Pastel assumes that the relevant parameter settings in each company you are consolidating are the same. This includes periods, general ledger report writer categories, and so on. In any event, the consolidated company inherits the parameter settings of the last company you consolidate.
• The consolidated company also inherits any or all reports written with the general ledger report writer in the last company. This is not too much of an issue since you can copy general ledger reports from one company to another within Pastel.
• Pastel assumes that general ledger accounts in each company are the same. The consolidation adds new general ledger accounts into the consolidated company the first time it encounters the account, and thereafter it updates the balances for that account.
• The financial category of a general ledger account is the financial category of the first account it encounters in the companies it is consolidating. However, Pastel will generate an appropriate warning if in the consolidated company a general ledger account’s balances are derived from accounts with the same account number and different financial categories.

 

Note that in this case either the trial balance and / or the balance sheet could go out of balance.

 

• If in one company a general ledger account is the main account with sub-accounts, and in another company, the same account does not have sub-accounts, then the trial balance will not balance at either the main or sub-account level.
• Pastel will only allow you to consolidate companies if they all share a common supervisor password, which you specify. This is to prevent unauthorised persons from gaining access to information they are not entitled to. Note that you can create more than one supervisor password per company.