BreezeGL has always had the ability to create financial statements that took data from 2 or more Spire companies and combine them together. It was a fundamental design feature from day one. But there was a caveat. If the chart-of-accounts from each company were significantly different, you had some manual work to do.
The old approach was to take the biggest or most complex chart-of-accounts and use the BreezeGL templates to create a starting report from that one, then add\modify the accounts that only existed in the second company. You would then create a new set of columns that represented company 2, then enter formulas to add the values from company 1 and company 2 together. For very similar charts-of-accounts this was not very complicated. But if they were very different, it became a real chore – albeit one you only had to do once for each report.
Starting in version 3.2, you can now tell BreezeGL that the two companies should be merged. When you create a report from a merged company, the template combines the charts of accounts (and values) before the report is generated. This gives you a much cleaner and more complete starting report from which to begin any customization.
Also, when loading data from Spire, it loads 3 different ‘companies’: company1, company2 and company1-company2. Now one report can report on all three, without having to add values together.
There are some notable points about this:
- You specify one of the companies as the “primary” company.
- The primary company is used for non-financial information such as account description, group etc. The same account number can’t show two different descriptions (but you can edit the final report to say anything you want). Likewise if the account was in different groups, it will show in the group as specified in the primary company. Again, this can be tweaked after the initial generation from the template.
- One exception to the primary account rule is if the same account number is a debit account in one company and a credit account in the other. In this case, all financial values from the non-primary with be multiplied by -1 in the consolidated numbers.
In some cases, the charts-of-accounts are similar enough such that reports generated from templates require little – if any – tweaking for consolidation. But if you plan to move forward with these two companies and create many future customized reports, it is suggested that you do some work to make them more compatible.
This new feature, along with many others in the past, was added when a new Spire user was considering BreezeGL. This is always a perfect opportunity for us to find ways to improve the product and gain another satisfied BreezeGL fan. Keep ’em coming!