Consolidate: Multi-Entity and Currency Financial Reporting
Automating multi-entity financials looks simple—until you actually do it. Currency, eliminations, intercompany activity, calendars, ownership—it gets complex fast.
Multi-entity financial consolidation software shouldn’t force a choice between manual spreadsheets and rigid black-box systems. Vivid keeps everything in Excel®, giving you transparent logic, fast roll-ups, accurate eliminations, and the flexibility finance teams need.
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Overcome Consolidation Challenges
Data Quality & Entity Alignment
Each subsidiary or business unit could have different systems, charts of accounts, fiscal calendars or classification schemes. That inconsistency makes it hard to align data for consolidation.
Intercompany Transactions & Eliminations
Entities sell to each other, lend to each other, share cost centers — all these inter‑entity flows must be identified, recorded and eliminated so they don’t inflate group totals.
Currency Translation & Foreign Entities
Foreign operations bring in multiple currencies, translation gains/losses, CTAs (cumulative translation adjustments) and sometimes different accounting standards.
Ownership Structures & Minority Interests
When your group includes partial ownership, joint ventures or non‑controlling interests, the consolidation method becomes more complex (full consolidation, equity method, etc.).
Slow Close Times, Lack of Visibility
Manual spreadsheets, delayed data submissions from entities, disconnected systems — all contribute to long close cycles and limited real‑time insight.
How Vivid Simplifies Multi-Entity Consolidation for Finance Teams
Centralized engine that supports multiple companies/entities, currencies and fiscal year ends.
Vivid has the scaleability you need to confidently manage results
Let Vivid cut the time to consolidate by 80%.Excel-native front-end that your team already knows for faster and wider adoption. No power users needed.
Convert your existing Excel reports - don't rebuild them
Ask us to prove we can get your team going in under a month.Built‑in logic for intercompany eliminations, segment filtering, currency conversions.
Vivid's semantic layer keeps all your reports in sync.
Change once, change everywhere.Drill from consolidated group down to entity, account, transaction detail, and even images all from one spreadsheet.
Use easy-to-manage control panels and reporting trees to investigate entities in a complex roll-up.
Reduce maintenance on consolidation reporting by 90%.Automate monthly consolidation and distribution of regional reporting packages - all from one platform.
Choose from finance self-serve or distribution automation options.
Take days of work out of your monthly close.Role‑based access, audit history, and secure multi‑entity architecture.
Let Vivid secure financial reporting access, information rights and drill-down rights.
Improve financial reporting securitySee Vivid In Action
Compare Tools for Multi-Entity Consolidation
What's Behind Most Excel-Based Automation Systems? Cell-Formulas.
What's a Cell-Formula?
Cell-formula reporting systems are tools that plug into Excel and populate cells using custom functions (e.g., DR(), COSMOS(), CUBEVALUE(), etc. They behave like Excel, and all share the same architectural pattern:
- Each cell where you want ERP data contains a function call to the vendor’s data model.
- A report is just a spreadsheet filled with these custom formulas – there is no centralization of business logic.
- All business logic exists inside Excel templates, in the cells themselves, not in a central model.
- If the business changes, you will need to find and edit every cell formula impacted.
Implications of Cell Formula-based Consolidation Systems? You could be making silent errors:
Even if marketed as “easy”, these systems require: 1) a power user to maintain the system; and 2) a specialist report developer that understands the semi-technical cell-formula language. When the power user sets up the account, they build a library of formulas and custom functions for report builders.
Cell formula can grow so complex they become unreadable and are not easy to debug: they can also be dozens of lines, with an average formula being ~100 characters, and the complex formulas used for consolidation easily reaching 1,500 characters. These have to be typed into each cell of a report.
Unfortunately, in a cell formula system each report (each cell) is the holder of its own business logic. If a new GL account or merged department or new entity or dimension or chart of account change or hierarchy changes… this change could inadvertently break every report that touches the formula. Changes to the business requires diligently checking every formula, every mapping, figuring out what reports are affected and updating each affected formula in each of these spreadsheets.
Without rigorous updates, silent errors can creep in.
What's a Silent Error?
Reports look like they have valid numbers – but don’t. This makes them dangerous because errors are hard to detect. Reports may simply disagree with each other, and the team might not know why.
ERP-Based Systems: Where Templates Dominate
Basics of ERP-Native Financial Reporting Tools
We’ve all used them – select the “income statement template” or use the report builder to select rows, columns, sums using a drag/drop menu. The systems look fantastic and often meet the needs of the basic ERP customer. Ultimately, the reporting process is often:
- Run the report and download the result.
- Open the report and copy this into a specific range in an excel spreadsheet – often repeating these steps a few times.
- Reformat in Excel, or perform the analysis intended in Excel.
The issue isn’t just formatting control, it’s that reporting is treated like a data access exercise, i.e., if the user can just get the right fields of information out of the ERP, the business needs are satisfied.
That’s true … sometimes. It’s also monolithic and not particularly adaptive so ERP reporting often gets CFOs 50% to 70% of the way, and Excel finishes the rest.
Implications of ERP-Native Systems: You'll likely be using Excel
ERP-native tools are good at what the ERP knows… but fall short when you need consolidation, multiple currencies, eliminations, or advanced reporting. This limitation forces your more advanced work into Excel.
Implications of using the vendor ERP? You’re really choosing to do reporting in Excel – so you might be back needing tools that better integrate and make working in Excel seamless.
Why is an ERP-Native Financial Reporting System Going to be Manual Excel?
Ultimately – ERP reporting of any complexity ends up in a spreadsheet.
It suffers the same version control, manual formatting, access control problems that CFOs wanted to get away from by buying the ERP in the first place.
Dashboards/BI Systems: Data Visualization First Systems
Basics of Dashboarding
Tools like Power BI, Looker, Qlik Sense, and Sisense are wonderful for analytic visualization. They were built for information display, large-scale data aggregation, exploration, and interactivity. They shine at charts, tiles, KPIs, time-series trends, filters, and drill/slice analysis.
The pain begins when organizations try to bend these systems into financial reporting tools.
Dashboards Only Show the Data They Are Given
If GL data isn’t properly transformed—rollups, eliminations, mappings, segment rules, currency logic—then the dashboard doesn’t produce insight.
It produces ungoverned noise
Behind every financial visualization sits hand-coded logic in DAX or SQL. That logic isn’t centralized—it lives inside each visual. Ten visuals can produce ten different answers. Dashboards also lose formatting, structure, and logic when exported so anyone who wants to view the data must access the BI system itself.
It’s expensive, and can be fragile
Every business change requires editing the hard-coded logic behind each widget, making the entire setup fragile and prone to error if the business changes. BI tools also lack native multi-entity, multi-currency, multi-ERP consolidation. Refresh pipelines frequently break. Auditing is poor. And IT—not Finance—owns the environment.
A Dashboard is Nothing More Than a Mirror
Gain – Power BI is an excellent tool – but it reflects whatever data it’s handed—right or wrong, complete or partial, governed or chaotic.
If Finance doesn’t own the transformation rules, mappings, rollups, and consolidation logic, the dashboard is not reporting the business… it’s projecting a fiction.
A True Financial Model, With Governance
Simplify Financial Reporting and Consolidation
Vivid is built on a singular foundation: Finance needs a governed financial model—not a spreadsheet engine, not an ERP bolt-on, not a dashboard workaround. Where the three alternatives fail, Vivid succeeds because it starts with the financial model: At the core of Vivid is a centralized, governed semantic model—the place where Finance owns the truth:
- Charts of accounts
- Segments and dimensions
- Rollups and structures
- Currency rules
- Consolidation logic
- Eliminations
- Mappings
- Period definitions
Actuals, budget, forecast logic
One change to the model updates every report instantly. No hidden DAX. No duplicated logic. No fragile templates. No Cell formula. Vivid’s design focuses on simplifying financial reporting – simple to use, simple to maintain, and it uses the language of finance rather than coders.
Make Consoliation Controlled, Extensible, Governed and Fast.
Financial reporting systems are fundamentally different and engineered for:
- One model → every report stays consistent
- One update → every report updates instantly
- Excel becomes a presentation layer, a creative and flexible reporting surface —not the engine
- Zero template maintenance
- Real multi-entity, multi-currency, multi-ERP consolidation
- Built-in budgeting, forecasting, and allocations
- Trusted drilldown to transaction detail
Accurate data for downstream dashboards
Where cell formulas are fragile, ERP tools are rigid, and dashboards are superficial, Vivid is controlled, extensible, governed, and fast.
Why the Vivid Alternative for Consolidation?
- Cell-formula systems scatter logic across hundreds of spreadsheets.
- ERP-native tools trap you inside the ERP’s structural limits – so you end up in Excel to get what you want.
- Dashboards only mirror the data they’re given—right or wrong — and the logic is in the widget.
- Vivid offers finance teams the ability to govern reporting logic – everywhere, always, it’s the same logic.
But finance needs more than a mirror. Finance needs truth.
Vivid is where Finance can own truth by defining, governing, maintaining, and delivering—every time, across every report, for every user.
These Vivid Clients Simplified Consolidation Without a Massive Effort. You Can Too.
Finance teams trust Vivid because it simplifies reporting and consolidation.
Frequently Ask Questions
What is multi-entity financial consolidation?
Multi-entity consolidation is the process of combining financial results from multiple legal entities, business units, or subsidiaries into one unified set of financial statements — often with eliminations, currency translation, and intercompany adjustments included.
Why is financial consolidation so complex?
Consolidation involves more than just adding numbers. Each entity may have different charts of accounts, currencies, fiscal calendars, or ownership structures. Intercompany transactions must be eliminated, and financial policies aligned. Large companies are often using Excel and manually doing the consolidation because the business logic can be quite complex.
Can I drill to transactions from consolidated results?
Yes. You can start with consolidated totals and drill through companies, segments, accounts, and transactions. You can also drill on row sums and formula.
How does Vivid simplify multi-entity consolidation?
Vivid CPM pulls data from each entity and applies consistent business rules — including segment alignment, eliminations, and translation — all within a single engine. You control the process from Excel, with real-time drill-down and refresh, across unlimited entities.
Does Vivid handle eliminations and intercompany transactions?
Yes. Vivid supports the creation of elimination rules and mapping that can automatically remove intercompany revenue, expenses, and balances as part of the consolidation process.
Can I consolidate companies that use different ERPs or GL systems?
Yes. Vivid supports multiple ERPs or data sources. Data is mapped into a common financial model so you can consolidate across platforms without reformatting manually.
Can we handle both local and reporting currencies?
Absolutely. Vivid supports currency translation and dual-reporting structures, allowing you to view consolidated reports in both local and group reporting currencies.
Is Vivid suitable for companies with complex ownership structures?
and roll-ups across multiple levels, giving finance full flexibility in representing ownership accurately.
How long does it take to get implemented?
Setup is straightforward. Vivid uses your existing reports and data structures, which reduces configuration time significantly.
Most teams have live reports that automatically refresh within a few weeks.
How secure is the system?
Vivid includes role-based permissions, encryption, and built-in data governance. Every user sees only what they are authorized to access, ensuring complete control and compliance.
For customers using Vivid cloud-based systems, Vivid’s hosted environment on Azure is secured using Microsoft’s enterprise-grade controls — including network isolation, encrypted data storage, and continuous security monitoring. Access is tightly governed through Vivid’s role-based access, and SOC 2–aligned operational practices.
What kind of support can we expect?
Responsive and expert support is central to Vivid’s approach. Our team understands financial reporting, responds quickly, and resolves most issues the same day.
Vivid rigorously measures Customer Effort Score – the definitive measure of support quality – and currently scores 6.97 out of 7 for the ease of every interaction with Vivid.
Are you on-prem or a cloud solution?
Vivid can be deployed on-prem (with your ERP on a SQL Server), we can provide a fully hosted cloud solution, or we can use a private cloud.
Vivid can also provide browser-based reporting with full drilldown and analytics capabilities were customers want to reduce desktop installs.
Do I need IT to help with or get invoved with the consolidation process if we go to Vivid?
No. Vivid is designed for finance users. Once configured, finance teams can manage entities, refresh reports, adjust mappings, and drill into results — all within Excel, without IT involvement.
If you have significant changes, like an acquisition, talk to your Vivid support specialist to help you adapt quickly to the change.
Consolidate Smarter, Not Harder
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