Reports consolidated across businesses

Ian_B

Hi, I like to generate a balance sheet and possibly other reports that cover all of my businesses. Is this option available and how do I do it?

Thanks

Mikeg

Ian_B,
I do not believe Wave is capable of producing consolidated financials. Your best bet would be to export to a CSV file. You can set up a template in excel and copy the data over from each individual file.
Mike G, CPA
www.mgfinancial.net

Ian_B

Thanks for getting back to me. This would be a useful feature as I quite often move money between my entities which makes it difficult to interpret how a given entity is doing. I could also include my personal finances so giving a holistic view of my current financial situation. Just a thought, keep up the good work

Mikeg

Thanks. I would assume it would be a complicated software feature. This is because from an accounting perspective whenever you have consolidated entities you need to be able to create elimination entries. This has the effect of negating all transactions between the entities. If not, transactions would be double counted if they were not eliminated.
Hope that makes sense.
Mike G, CPA
www.mgfinancial.net

Ian_B

Thanks yes I understand it might be difficult to code. From my point of view transfers from one business to another would balance out for positives and negatives. It might be worth looking at how hard it would be. I have a coding background as well and sometimes these things can be done surprisingly elegantly with in given constraints. Thanks anyway

AlexL

Hi @Ian_B . Mikeg is correct here. There's no current way to consolidate your finances in a given report at the moment. Your best bet here would be to export all of your information to a .csv at which point you could add together and manipulate the data to your needs. Thanks @Mikeg for covering this one.

JAM

Isn't this another example of where sub accounts would provide people to manage their sub businesses / properties as well as do rollup reporting?

AlexL

@JAM . Kind of. You'd have to consolidate all of your finances under the same business to have sub-categories be effective here and it looks like Ian wants to actually keep his finances in separate businesses where he can generate a report for all of them.

thomssi

This isn't going to be particularly helpful but while some software can sort of do consolidated accounting pretty much nothing does it properly. Wave doesn't attempt to do it at all. Probably mostly for the best to be honest. I'd rather have that sort of thing missing and get someone competent to do it (like me!) rather than have a false sense of security and submit incorrect stuff somewhere important.

There are various types of consolidation but in full consolidation you pretty much add stuff up by adding it line by line and then there are some adjustments (only parent equity amount, difference between equity and balance sheet for subsidiaries etc). Now if this isn't a parent/subsidiary thing some of those may go away. The problem almost no software addresses is intercompany transactions. On consolidation these should be eliminated. Now if is just cash then won't matter but if you have debtors/creditors between companies then just adding up will produce an incorrect grossed up balance sheet. Same for revenue and expenses/cost of sales. Given in this example cash at least is moving, where is the other entry in each set of accounts? Must be somewhere and you likely don't want to be just adding them.

I don't know the easiest way of doing this but I would try something like having a note on intercompany transactions or a separate account for each type of transaction between intercompany and external (or hey Wave, add subaccounts, been raised by many numerous times and is pretty basic thing rather than these workrounds......, yes I know it is free but this is a glaring omission nonetheless) and then download and filter them out.