If your business runs more than one company, someone has to answer a simple question every month: how did we do as a group? Getting to that answer means consolidating — rolling the numbers from every company into one set of financial statements.
Welcome to Round 34 of our Dynamics GP vs. Dynamics Business Central: Functionality Face-Off series. Yesterday we looked at how intercompany transactions move between companies. Today we look at the next step: pulling all those companies together into one consolidated picture.
The short version: GP consolidates in the reporting layer, using a separate program. Business Central consolidates inside the ERP itself, in a real consolidated company you can report on any time.
How you do it in Dynamics GP
Here’s the first thing to understand about GP: the core product does not have a consolidation module. GP keeps each company’s ledger separate, and consolidation happens in Management Reporter — the separate financial reporting program we covered back in Round 6 on financial reporting.
The standard approach uses a reporting tree, as described in Microsoft’s guide to consolidated statements in Management Reporter:
- Verify every GP company is in the Management Reporter data mart. Each company must be integrated from the Configuration Console before it can appear on a report.
- Build a row definition that includes every account from every company. If the companies share one chart of accounts, this is one set of rows. If the charts differ, you build multiple “links to financial dimensions” and map each company’s accounts to the right rows.
- Build a column definition for the periods and comparisons you want. For a side-by-side view, you add a column per company and restrict each column to its reporting unit.
- Build a reporting tree with a reporting unit for each company. The tree is what tells Management Reporter which companies roll up into the total.
- Generate the report. The consolidated total appears at the summary level of the tree.
That handles the roll-up. Now the extras:
- Eliminations. Management Reporter does not create elimination entries. The common practice — straight from years of GP community guidance — is to create a separate shell company in GP (an “elimination company”), post your elimination journal entries there, and add it to the reporting tree so it nets out the intercompany activity.
- Different currencies. GP can translate a subsidiary’s balances, but the setup is real work: exchange tables for average, current, and historical rates, multicurrency access, a translation type on every account, and currency source columns in the report. Microsoft’s own consolidated currency translation guide walks through all of it — across two programs.
- Partial ownership. Own 80% of a subsidiary? You handle that with calculation columns and rollup percentages in the report design.
The result is a consolidated report — but not a consolidated ledger. There is no single place where the group’s balances live. If the report design breaks, so does your consolidation.
How you do it in Business Central
Business Central builds consolidation into the application. You create a consolidated company — a real company inside BC — and the system posts the group’s numbers into it, as described in Microsoft’s consolidation setup guide.
- Run the Company Consolidation assisted setup guide. For a straightforward group — wholly owned subsidiaries — the guide walks you through creating the consolidated company and previewing the results before anything posts.
- Set up business units. Each subsidiary becomes a business unit card in the consolidated company. The card holds the company’s fiscal year dates, its currency, and the percentage of each account to include — so 80% ownership is a field, not a formula.
- Map the accounts. If a subsidiary’s chart of accounts differs from the group’s, you enter the consolidation account on each G/L account. Different charts of accounts are fine — the mapping lives on the account card, not in a report definition.
- Test before you post. The Test Database and Test File actions check the data and flag differences before anything transfers, per Microsoft’s consolidation how-to.
- Choose the Consolidate action. BC transfers each business unit’s net changes into the consolidated company’s ledger. Subsidiaries in other BC databases — or other systems entirely — come in by API or file import. Different currencies are translated during the run using the average and closing rates you set. If a subsidiary restates a period, you simply re-run the consolidation for that period.
Eliminations are still a manual journal — BC doesn’t invent those numbers for you either — but the G/L Consolidation Eliminations report shows you a tentative trial balance so you can see the effect of your elimination entries before you post them. And the Consolidated Trial Balance (4) report lays out local balances, converted values, eliminations, and consolidated totals in four columns, on one page.
The key difference: after the run, the consolidated company holds real general ledger entries. Every financial report in BC — including the Analysis Mode views we covered in Round 25 — works on the consolidated numbers immediately.
Side by side
| Dynamics GP | Business Central |
|---|
| Dynamics GP | Business Central | |
|---|---|---|
| Where consolidation lives | Management Reporter (separate program) | Inside BC, in a consolidated company |
| Consolidated ledger | No — report output only | Yes — real G/L entries |
| Setup help | Manual report design | Assisted setup guide |
| Different charts of accounts | Multiple row links mapped in the report | Consolidation account mapped on each G/L account |
| Partial ownership | Calculation columns in the report | Percentage field on the business unit card |
| Currency translation | Exchange tables + account translation types + report columns | Average and closing rates applied during the run |
| Eliminations | Manual entries in a shell elimination company | Manual journal with a built-in eliminations preview report |
| Companies outside the database | Data mart integrations, one per instance | API or file import, including non-BC systems |
| Re-running a period | Regenerate the report | Re-consolidate the period |
Why BC comes out ahead
GP’s approach works — thousands of companies close their books on Management Reporter trees every month, and a well-built tree is a dependable thing. But the consolidation only exists inside a report definition, in a second program, held together by a data mart sync.
Business Central makes consolidation part of the ERP. The consolidated company is a real company with a real ledger. Ownership percentages, account mappings, and currency translation are setup fields you enter once — not report design you rebuild when something changes. The test actions catch problems before they post. And because subsidiaries can feed the consolidation by API or file, the group picture doesn’t care which database — or which system — a company lives in.
For a growing group of companies, that’s the difference between maintaining a report and owning a ledger.
Thinking about the move?
Aisling Dynamics has helped multi-company organizations run consolidations in both products, and we can show you exactly what your month-end roll-up would look like in Business Central — mappings, eliminations, currencies and all. Explore our services, or contact us at (251) 293-0555 for a straightforward conversation about your group’s structure.
Next round: prepayments on orders — GP prepayments vs. BC prepayment invoices on sales and purchase orders.