6 Reasons Financial Consolidation Belongs in Your Planning Process

Financial consolidation often becomes a hidden bottleneck as your organization grows.

Disconnected data, manual work, and rising complexity slow your close and make it harder to trust the numbers behind your plans.

Bringing financial consolidation directly into your budgeting and planning processes gives you a single source of truth for financial performance management. You spend less time reconciling numbers and more time using them to move the business forward.

As growth adds complexity, through acquisitions, global operations, or IPO readiness, this unified approach becomes essential. Read on to see how an integrated consolidation solution helps you move faster, plan with confidence, and stay in control as your business scales.

Financial consolidation plays a critical role in how you build, manage, and trust your budgets and plans. As your organization grows, planning quickly becomes more complex, especially when you’re dealing with multiple entities, currencies, or shared costs. Without consolidation built into the process, these scenarios become difficult to manage accurately and consistently.

When consolidation functionality is missing, common planning tasks, such as intercompany eliminations, currency conversions, or complex allocations, often rely on spreadsheets and manual workarounds. That extra effort slows you down, increases the risk of errors, and makes it harder to rely on your plans when making decisions.

Consolidation is especially important in budgeting and planning across these six key areas:

• Intercompany eliminations to prevent double-counting across entities
• Alternate rollups and hierarchies to support different management and reporting views
• Complex allocations that reflect how costs and revenue actually flow through the business
• Currency conversion scenarios to plan accurately across global operations
• Journal entries on budgets to handle adjustments without breaking your models
• Auditability of budgets and forecasts so you can explain and defend your numbers with confidence

By incorporating financial consolidation functionality directly into your budgeting and planning solution, you eliminate many of the friction points that slow FP&A teams down. Your data stays aligned across entities and scenarios, without constant reconciliation or manual fixes.

The result is a more efficient planning process and more reliable outputs. You can deliver budgets, forecasts, and reports faster, with greater accuracy, and focus your time on strategic planning instead of correcting numbers after the fact.

Including financial consolidation directly within your planning process gives you a more complete and reliable view of the business. When consolidation and budgeting live in the same system, you remove silos that slow teams down and limit visibility across finance and the broader organization.

With actuals and budget data aligned in a single format, you can track performance more easily, spot issues earlier, and respond with confidence. There’s no need to reconcile numbers across systems or question whether your plans reflect reality.

A unified approach also improves collaboration beyond finance. Teams in HR, sales, and operations can contribute directly to plans using the same financial foundation, ensuring their inputs roll up accurately and consistently.

The result is a more agile organization, one that can adapt to change, support growth initiatives, and make decisions faster because everyone is working from the same set of trusted numbers.

Planful fully embraces the ideal of providing a unified solution for budgeting and planning, as well as financial consolidation and reporting.

Our cloud-based FPM platform integrates powerful financial consolidation capabilities, such as automated intercompany eliminations, real-time currency conversions, and comprehensive auditability—enabling organizations to improve accuracy and increase speed in their financial processes.

Unlike many other platforms, Planful’s solution seamlessly scales as your organization grows, allowing you to transition from basic budgeting to complex financial consolidation without investing in separate tools.

Not only does Planful provide complete functionality for budgeting and planning, as well as financial consolidation, our solution provides market-leading capabilities throughout.

By integrating automation and AI into the consolidation process, Planful also helps finance teams and teams across the business automate repetitive tasks, improve forecasting accuracy, and prepare for future growth.

• Financial consolidation plays a critical role in breaking down silos and supporting accurate, agile planning.
• A unified platform simplifies complex requirements, such as intercompany eliminations, currency conversion, and audit-ready plans.
• When consolidation is built directly into planning workflows, as with Planful’s accounting solution, you eliminate manual workarounds and gain more time to focus on decisions that move the business forward.

---

Ready to streamline your financial consolidation process with Planful?

Get your on-demand demo to get started.

---

 

What is financial consolidation functionality in planning tools?

Financial consolidation functionality refers to the ability of planning tools to combine financial data from multiple entities, currencies, or departments into a single, accurate view. This is essential for managing intercompany eliminations, currency conversions, and audit-ready reporting during planning cycles.

Why is integrated financial consolidation important for budgeting and forecasting?

When consolidation is separate from planning, finance teams face delays, errors, and redundant work. Integrating financial consolidation functionality into planning ensures cleaner data, faster reporting, and more confident decision-making.

How does Planful support financial consolidation in budgeting workflows?

Planful embeds financial consolidation functionality directly into its unified platform, so teams don’t need separate tools or manual adjustments. This approach enables faster closes, streamlined planning, and accurate data across budgets, forecasts, and reports, all in one place.