Entities multiply faster than finance teams do. That is the whole problem, stated in 1 sentence.
A company opens in a second country and incorporates there. The local accountant recommends the local ledger. Somebody sets it up in an afternoon and it works fine. Repeat 3 times and the finance function is running 4 systems, none of which was a bad decision on its own day, and all of which together mean nobody can answer a group question without assembling the answer by hand.
All Gravy hit exactly this. 4 trading entities in Denmark, the UK, Sweden and Norway, on e-conomic, Xero, Fortnox and Tripletex respectively. Every market brought a ledger, and every ledger brought a dependency.
systems at All Gravy: 4 ledgers, a card provider and 2 payment platforms, on 1 platform
days to close 4 countries at All Gravy, with nobody working nights
trading entities at Tillo across 23 countries and 23 currencies, on 1 ledger
The dependency nobody plans for
Local systems demand local people. Each market needs a bookkeeper who can read that interface and knows its quirks, which turns 4 ledgers into 4 dependencies and 4 places the close can stall. A slow month in 1 market holds the whole group.
That is the cost that does not appear in a software comparison. The license fees for 4 small-market ledgers are trivial. The organisational cost is 4 people who cannot cover for each other, 4 different definitions of the same account, and a group number that exists only after somebody has manually assembled it.
Paebbl found the same thing across the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and Finland. "Having three different ERP General Ledgers across our Group made it difficult and time consuming," says Christoph Zinsser, the company's VP Finance.
What entity management is supposed to mean
Most products sold under this label manage entities as records: a directory of legal entities, their registrations, their filing deadlines, their officers. Useful compliance tooling, and entirely separate from the ledger, which means it does nothing about the reason the group is hard to run.
The version that changes the work is entity as a dimension of the ledger itself. 1 chart of accounts, with entity, department and country sitting on the transaction rather than encoded into account numbers. All Gravy rebuilt its chart of accounts exactly this way during migration, with custom dimensions for department and country in place from day 1, replacing a structure that had faked departmental reporting through dedicated GL accounts.
Once entity is a dimension, the group view is not assembled. It is the default, and a single entity is the filtered case.
"Going from logging into four different systems to seeing every entity in one place was the part that changed my day."
Linea Meldgaard Andersen, Finance Analyst, All Gravy
Old model
An entity is a system
Each market runs its own ledger with its own login, its own bookkeeper and its own chart of accounts. The group number gets assembled by hand.
Light's model
An entity is a dimension
Every entity sits on 1 ledger alongside department and country. The group view is the default and a single entity is a filter.
What changes
Work by function, not by entity
Revenue, approvals and reconciliations get done once for the whole group rather than 4 times over, which is where the days come from.
Doing the work once
Tillo runs 4 trading entities across 23 countries and 23 currencies, and the shift that took its close from 12 days to 5 was structural rather than procedural. Nobody closes an entity, logs out and starts the next one. The team works across the group by function: revenue, approvals, reconciliations, each done once for all 4 entities instead of 4 times over.
That is the arithmetic behind every number on this page. 4 entities on 4 systems means the close is 4 closes plus a consolidation. 4 entities on 1 ledger means the close is 1 close.
"Group entity management has saved every member of the team hours and hours."
Harriet Stewart, Head of Business Systems, Tillo
Officeguru runs Denmark and Germany with a finance team of 2. Omnea runs the UK and US on 1 ledger. Alva Labs runs Sweden, Norway and the UK with intercompany elimination posting as transactions happen. Light supports 19 countries out of the box, from US GAAP to UK MTD VAT, which is the part that decides whether a fifth market is a project or a configuration.
When this becomes urgent
The trigger is rarely the second entity. It is the third or fourth, and it usually arrives alongside something else: a funding round that wants monthly consolidated reporting, an acquisition, a first statutory audit, or a finance lead who works out that the group has no consolidated view without a week of assembly.
All Gravy's Head of Finance and Ops framed the test as whether the foundation scales 10 times, which is the right question to ask before the fifth market rather than after it. Adding an entity should be a configuration decision. In most stacks it is a procurement decision, a hiring decision and a permanent addition to the length of every future close.
See how Light runs multi-entity groups, or book a demo.