Financial Consolidation lets organizations reconcile, consolidate, summarize and aggregate financial data based on different accounting standards and government regulations.

They are a fundamental part of CPM, because they create the audited, enterprise-level view of financial information that must be shared with other CPM applications to analyze variance from targets. Financial-consolidation solutions are increasingly linked with financial-governance initiatives, and many solutions incorporate additional process controls to support financial-close management.

Financial Consolidation Applications should:

• Require complex transaction-processing rules to automate intercompany eliminations.
• Maintain a detailed audit trail of all transactions processed to arrive at the consolidated financial results.
• Provide sophisticated multicurrency-handling capabilities, including the ability to support complex translation and revaluation processing.
• Scalable enough to support different deployment models.
• Provide a group consolidation using shared dimensions (such as legal entity and account)