Typical installations in large firms involved thousands of entities flowing into hundreds of levels of consolidation in several structures. Capabilities for exception reporting, currency conversion, journal entries and audit trails, security, and other accounting controls were required.
All of our clients used Excel throughout their companies, and we were often asked to provide interfaces to and from Excel so users could work with input and consolidated data within Excel.
Where the financial and accounting controls were not needed these tools to incorporate Excel represented solutions that cost into six figures.
The need was for a tool to provide a straightforward approach to add up Excel workbooks without intermediate steps or duplicating all of the data in a database.
Our large decision support systems never made use of any kind of linking formulas to tie accounts of entities together for consolidation. This would have been prohibitively complicated where more than a handful of entities were involved.
We viewed the thousands of accounts and columns for each entity as a single record and added all of them together at one time. This is simpler and faster than any other approach, and it makes setting up and changing a consolidation easy.
It is this approach that we scaled down and adapted for Excel in our ExcelCube package.
