Consolidation is not an accounting problem. It is an architecture problem wearing an accounting problem's clothes.
Nothing about holding 4 legal entities requires 4 sets of books. That requirement was inherited, not chosen. It arrives the moment a company puts its first entity on a ledger built to hold exactly 1, and every consolidation tool sold since exists to paper over that original decision once a month, forever.
Tillo made the decision differently. 4 trading entities, 23 currencies, 23 countries, 1 ledger. The close takes 5 days. A year ago the same close took 12, spread across 8 separate ledgers, 7 instances of QuickBooks and 1 of Xero, each needing its own login and its own export before anyone could begin adding the numbers together. The finance team did not get faster. The architecture underneath them changed, and consolidation stopped being work.
days to close at Tillo, across 4 entities and 23 currencies, after 8 ledgers became 1
reduction in close time at Ocean.io, once consolidation stopped depending on 2 charts of accounts
systems at Oper Credits, where consolidation used to take half a week and now posts as transactions happen
What the tool was actually for
Traditional consolidation software does 1 job well: it reconciles ledgers that were never designed to speak to each other. Extract from each entity. Map to a common chart of accounts. Eliminate the intercompany balances. Revalue the currencies. Produce the number the board sees.
Every step in that sequence is repair work. None of it would be necessary if the entities had shared a ledger in the first place, which is why buying a faster version of it each year changes the duration of the repair and nothing else. A finance team can run the best consolidation engine on the market and still spend the same week every month waiting for entity 3 to close before entity 4's numbers mean anything.
Paebbl ran 4 entities across the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and Finland, each on its own ERP general ledger. "Having three different ERP General Ledgers across our Group made it difficult and time consuming," says Christoph Zinsser, the company's VP Finance. That sentence is the entire category's business model, stated by a customer.
The other model
At Oper Credits, consolidation across 3 entities used to take, in the finance manager's words, "half a week, a little more." It now posts as transactions happen. There is no month-end scramble because there is no month-end assembly step. The company has since gone from 8 systems to 3.
All Gravy ran 4 entities across Denmark, the UK, Sweden and Norway on 4 different ledgers: e-conomic, Xero, Fortnox and Tripletex, with a card provider and 2 payment platforms on top. 7 systems. Every market that opened brought another one, and each local system needed a local bookkeeper who knew its quirks, which turned 4 ledgers into 4 dependencies and 4 places the close could stall. All 7 are now 1, and the group closes in 5 days.
At Alva Labs, consolidation and intercompany elimination run across the Swedish, Norwegian and UK entities on 1 ledger. The monthly board report, which used to take days, assembles in seconds: an agent with read access to the ledger and the CRM builds it on request. KeyShot runs entities in Denmark and the United States, and its CFO describes the change in 1 line: what once took days in Excel now happens instantly. Officeguru runs Denmark and Germany with a finance team of 2.
"The multi-entity consolidation, that's the primary thing I really, really like about Light."
Kristoffer, CFO, Ocean.io
The mechanism is the same in every case and it is unglamorous. 1 ledger holds every entity, every currency and every accounting standard the group reports under, in 19 countries from US GAAP to UK MTD VAT. Eliminations, FX revaluation and group reporting run against transactions as they post. There is no extract, because nothing left. There is no mapping, because nothing diverged.
Old model
Consolidate after the fact
Each entity keeps its own ledger. A separate tool extracts, maps to a common chart of accounts and eliminates intercompany balances once a month, after every entity has closed.
Light's model
Never separate to begin with
Every entity, currency and standard sits on 1 ledger. Eliminations, FX revaluation and group reporting run on transactions as they post.
What changes
The step stops existing
Tillo: 12 days to 5. Ocean.io: down 60%. Oper Credits: half a week to automatic. The number moves with entity count. The direction does not.
The choice on the table
A multi-entity finance team evaluating this today is choosing between 2 versions of the same compromise. Stay on entity-level tools and buy a consolidation layer, which treats the symptom every month and never touches the cause. Or commit to an enterprise ERP implementation sized for a company several times larger, which resolves the architecture by installing one that takes a consultant to change.
Tillo, Ocean.io, Oper Credits, Alva Labs, KeyShot, Officeguru, Paebbl and Omnea took neither. Each moved every entity onto a ledger built from the start to hold multiple entities, currencies and standards, and the consolidation problem stopped requiring a solution because it stopped being a problem.
"Group entity management has saved every member of the team hours and hours."
Harriet Stewart, Head of Business Systems, Tillo
What those teams got back was not hours. Harriet Stewart puts the real outcome plainly: finance at Tillo "stopped being a boring back-office function and became a key player in driving growth and direction." That is the trade. A week of assembly work each month, exchanged for a finance function that spends its time on the business instead of on the reconciliation of its own records.
The teams still buying consolidation as a category are maintaining a decision made when the company had 1 entity. The ones who moved are not consolidating faster. They stopped consolidating. Everything left to decide is scheduling.
See how Light's workforce runs the rest of the close, or book a demo.