Why Manual Consolidation Persists — Even When Everyone Knows It's Broken

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A group CFO once told us something that stuck. She runs finance across 20+ entities on six different ERPs. Smart, experienced, completely overqualified for what she spends the first two weeks of every month doing: getting numbers into a format where she can actually analyse them.

"By the time I have insights," she said, "the month is already over."

This is not an unusual story. It is the norm for group finance teams managing multiple entities. And the question worth asking is: why does it persist?

The tools exist. Consolidation platforms have been on the market for decades. The problem is well understood. And yet most multi-entity groups are stil lrunning their monthly close on a combination of manual exports, spreadsheet mapping, and email-coordinated reconciliation.

The reason is not that finance teams lack discipline or capability. It is that the existing solutions carry a cost that many organisations cannot absorb.

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Traditional consolidation platforms.

Luca Net, OneStream, SAP BPC and their peers — are powerful tools built for complex structures. But they share a foundational assumption: you standardize first, then consolidate. Map your chart of accounts to their standard. Clean your ERP data. Align your structures. Then the tool works.

That standardisation project takes four to six months on average. It requires consultants. It requires internal IT coordination. And every time the group changes — a new acquisition, a restructuring, an entity renamed — the maintenance cycle begins again.

For a PE firm acquiring a company each quarter, that timeline is structurally incompatible with operational reality. So the firm stays in Excel, absorbs the manual burden, and accepts that consolidated financials will always arrive too late to influence the decisions that matter most.

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The bottleneck is not software capability.

It is lifecycle friction — the cumulative cost of implementing, maintaining, and adapting a system across a group that is constantly changing.

Solving that friction requires a different architectural assumption: that the platform should adapt to the group, not the other way around.

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→ *Read the full analysis:

[Why AI-Native Architecture Is the Only Way to Automate Intercompany Eliminations Across Multiple ERPs]*

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