Available in Sage 50 Premium Accounting and higher.
Consolidate Companies (Overview)
Company consolidation lets you combine the charts of accounts of a number of existing Sage 50 companies to create a new consolidated chart of accounts. The new consolidated company created in this way will let you see consolidated financial statements for a number of subsidiary companies operating under an umbrella organization.
For example, say your company is a food service organization that incorporates a restaurant, a food distribution service, and a catering service. You could combine the charts of accounts of these three subcompanies to create a new consolidated chart of accounts for the entire organization.
Consolidated companies you create act exactly like any other Sage 50 company. You can add to their charts of accounts, maintain customers, vendors, and employees, and report on company just as you would in any other company.
You consolidate companies through the New Company Setup process.
- In the New Company Setup - Company Information window, you enter information for your new company as usual.
- In a window called New Company Setup - Subsidiary Companies, you choose the subsidiary companies you want to use to make up the new consolidated company. In the example above, say you want to create a new food service organization called Ah! Italia Foods. In the Subsidiary Companies window, you would add your three existing subsidiary companies to this organization:
- Nella's Bella Napoli Restaurant
- Minestrone to Nuts Food Distributors
- Ciao Now Caterers
The result would be a company that contains the charts of accounts of the three subsidiary companies. Now you'd be able to track general ledger information, budget, and create financial statements and general ledger reports for all the subsidiary companies within your new consolidated company. This would greatly simplify and streamline your financial duties for the three subsidiary companies.
Consolidation Rules and Facts
Following is information you should know about consolidated companies and the subsidiary companies that make them up:
- The companies you choose as subsidiary companies must all have been created in the same release of Sage 50—for example, Sage 50 2013.
- The subsidiary companies you choose must all use the same accounting method (that is, cash or accrual) and have the same fiscal-year structure. The consolidated company you create will share these same attributes.
- For all subsidiary companies you choose, each general ledger account must be of the same exact type (for example, Account 10001, Petty Cash).
- The new consolidated company will contain transaction and budgeting information brought over from the subsidiary companies.
- Budget information for subsidiary companies will be imported into the consolidated company along with the charts of accounts of the subcompanies. Budgets for each account in each subcompany will be totaled to create the budget for the corresponding account in the consolidated company.
- If the subsidiary companies you choose require user IDs and passwords for access, you will need to enter the ID and password for each subcompany. Tell me more about this.
- So that you'll be able to determine the origin of transactions created in subsidiary companies, general journal descriptions will include the company name of the subcompany in which a transaction was created.
- All transactions created in the consolidated company will have the reference "Consolidated Trans."
- If the account segment structure for the consolidated companies is the same, the structure will be copied automatically to the master company when it is created. However, if the structure is not the same, Sage 50 will leave the segment fields blank in the master company and notify you as such when you create the master company.
For more rules and conditions you should know before consolidating, see the "Pre-Consolidation Checklist."
Reconsolidating Companies
At some point in the life your consolidated company, you may want to remove one or more of the subcompanies that make it up. Or, you may want to add one or more new subsidiary companies. The Reconsolidate option in the File menu lets you do this. Tell me more about this.