BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
REAL WAYS TO STREAMLINE YOUR FINANCIAL CONSOLIDATION The pandemic has increased the workload for finance teams in sport – managing the furlough situation as well as meeting the demands for constant reforecasting and scenario planning. However, the usual financial statements must still be produced on top of all this extra essential work. Many businesses – whether in sport or any other industry – struggle to generate timely, accurate financial statements. Pressure from investors and other stakeholders to produce them quickly can be at odds with the finance team’s responsibility to ensure they’re correct. Managing the balance between these two competing priorities is difficult enough when you’re only dealing with one entity. It’s exponentially harder if you need to consolidate results from several different business units to produce a single set of reports and are juggling the added demands created by the volatile nature of financial planning as we emerge from lockdown. Challenges of complexity What makes consolidation so challenging is that the data required for reporting is not always in one place. As businesses expand, they may invest in or acquire other companies, or diversify their offering to create different income streams – there can be ticket sales, hospitality, retail (and online sales), other events and more. 42 | OTFF ISSUE 17 ★ OCTOBER 2021
While diversifying and creating new income streams is welcome, particularly just now, it’s not always so great for the corporate finance team, however, in terms of workload and time pressure. Dependent on the systems used and how they are organised, to prepare consolidated financial statements, data may first have to be exported from each system and converted into a standard format. It then needs to be normalised to
balances and completing other tasks. Much of this work may have to be done manually, using spreadsheets, so the risk of errors is significant, especially with so much pressure to work quickly. Addressing the pain points Automating data conversion can help address some of these issues, and companies with highly skilled finance and IT staff often develop complex extract, transform and load (ETL) processes for just this reason. This can be a long, involved process, however and – like other forms of integration – software upgrades or other system changes can disrupt the entire process, resulting in costly maintenance. Few busy finance teams in sport have the time or the resources for this.
“A system like NetSuite gives mutlicost centre sports businesses fully automated, real-time financial consolidation, resulting in a faster close process and more timely reporting." ensure like is combined with like. Only then does the consolidation reporting process really begin. As any finance professional reading this will know only too well, what follows can be a long, involved process of reviewing account details, allocating overhead costs, identifying and eliminating intercompany transactions, adjusting
Consolidation made easy Fortunately, there is another option for consolidated accounting that is both faster and easier to manage, and that is the right ERP / financial software. One
