Business consolidation examples show how growing companies bring order to complex reporting across multiple business units, subsidiaries, or markets. It usually starts when reporting gets too slow, inconsistent, or just plain messy.
In finance, this often means pulling actuals, forecasts, and plans from different systems and trying to align them into one clear view. It sounds simple enough, until you run into different account structures, mismatched templates, and teams working on their own versions of the truth.
Still, some companies manage to make consolidation work without overcomplicating it. In this post, we’ll walk through a few business consolidation examples that show how real teams bring structure to complexity, one step at a time. Along the way, you’ll see what typically goes wrong, what actually works, and why structure and consistency are more important than any tool or framework.
Read more: Financial Consolidation: Definition, Challenges & Solutions
Why Financial Consolidation Gets Complicated
In theory, business consolidation sounds straightforward: align your data, connect the systems, and report everything from one place.
In reality, several issues get in the way:
- Different tools across teams: One unit uses SAP, another Excel, another Power BI. Systems don’t talk to each other easily.
- Inconsistent structures: Some regions report by product line, others by customer segment. This makes group-level alignment difficult.
- Varying definitions: Even core concepts,like what counts as operating cost, can mean different things to different teams.
- Local workarounds: Teams build their own templates and models to get things done, which complicates group reporting.
- Manual processes: A lot of consolidation still happens in spreadsheets, often involving copy-paste work that’s time-consuming and error-prone.
- Slow closes: What could be a few days’ work stretches into weeks because of misalignment and rework.
- No clear ownership: Often, no one person or team owns the full process end-to-end, leading to gaps and delays.
Consolidation isn’t just a data or tech issue. It’s a process problem that needs structure, shared rules, and teamwork.
Below we will show business consolidation examples:
Example 1: Aligning Financials Across Multiple Legal Entities
In many multinational companies, group reporting involves pulling data from multiple legal entities across different countries. Each entity may use its own accounting tools, charts of accounts, and reporting formats. As the group grows, consolidation becomes slower, more error-prone, and increasingly difficult to manage manually.
This kind of effort typically starts with Excel templates and ends with a phased rollout of automation rules that handle currency conversion, intercompany eliminations, and audit trails. The work isn’t always visible to leadership, but the time saved every month adds up to real value.
Why it matters: Standardizing structure is often the most effective way to improve consolidation, especially when full system unification isn’t realistic.
Mi Hub: From Multiple Sources Chaos to Consolidated Control
Mi Hub, a UK-based uniform supplier with operations in the U.K. and U.S., faced slow, manual closes due to separate ERPs and one massive Excel workbook managed by a single controller. That single point of failure delayed month-end reporting significantly.
By standardizing the structure and adopting a dedicated consolidation platform, Mi Hub was able to automate eliminations, currency conversions, and reporting logic. What used to take weeks now takes days, with less risk and greater visibility for leadership. Mid-sized groups often suffer from overly manual processes. A small system upgrade can have a big impact.
Example 2: Consolidating with Mixed Ownership Models
Some companies grow by investing in or acquiring other businesses, and not always as full owners. It’s common to see a mix of fully owned subsidiaries, joint ventures, and minority stakes under one roof.
That mix creates complexity in consolidation. For example, you may report 100% of results from a fully owned brand but only a portion of results from a joint venture. And a minority stake might not get included in the same way at all.
To keep things clear, many finance teams build simple rules that define how each entity is treated. Internal reports might show the full picture for performance tracking, while official reports follow accounting standards like IFRS.
Why it matters: It helps teams compare apples to apples, making sure they’re not overstating or double-counting anything.
Read more: Best Consolidation Software in 2025: How to Choose the Right One
PepsiCo: Consolidation Across Brands
PepsiCo is a classic example of large-scale financial consolidation. Under one corporate group sit brands like Quaker Oats, Frito-Lay, Tropicana, and Gatorade. Each runs its own P&L, often in different currencies and ERP systems. If raw numbers were combined without adjustment, intercompany transactions (like Quaker selling oats to Frito-Lay) would distort the group’s total revenue.
That’s where consolidation entries come in. PepsiCo eliminates intercompany transactions and standardizes its reporting so that the final statements reflect actual business performance, not inflated internal sales. This gives stakeholders a reliable view of the full business.Even at the enterprise level, fundamentals like intercompany elimination remain central to accurate consolidation.
Example 3: Group-Level Consolidation After Restructuring
Our third business consolidation example comes from a typical post-restructuring scenario — after an acquisition, carve-out, or internal reorganization. Suddenly, the group finance team is responsible for consolidating dozens of legal entities, each with its own reporting calendar, chart of accounts, and unresolved intercompany balances.
Post-restructuring consolidation often includes legal and technical clean-up, but the biggest challenge is usually cultural: getting newly combined teams to agree on a single reporting standard and timeline. It often requires executive alignment and a few cycles of trial and error before results stabilize.
Why it matters: In post-restructuring scenarios, consolidation is often the first test of whether a new group setup can work in practice.
Airbus: Group Consolidation After a Major Restructuring
In the early 2000s, Airbus was struggling with delays in its A380 program and operational inefficiencies across its European divisions. To fix the situation, the company launched a large-scale restructuring initiative.
This included aligning production processes, reorganizing supply chains, and streamlining its management structure. As part of the effort, Airbus brought various subsidiaries and operational units under a single reporting and governance framework.
The result was a more integrated organization with clearer oversight and faster decision-making at the group level. The consolidation helped Airbus regain competitiveness and improve how it managed performance across the entire business. Restructuring isn’t just about cost-cutting – it’s also a chance to fix broken processes and build a stronger, more aligned reporting structure.
What We Can Learn from These Cases
Business consolidation in finance isn’t just about rolling up numbers. It’s about building clarity across different systems, teams, and ownership structures – often with limited time and imperfect data.
Across all these scenarios, a few patterns stand out:
- Structure comes first. Whether you’re consolidating across entities, ownership models, or after a major change, alignment on reporting formats and timelines is essential.
- Not everything needs to be unified right away. Many teams consolidate effectively even when local systems vary – by mapping to a shared format instead of forcing full standardization upfront.
- Clear rules reduce friction. Especially in groups with mixed ownership or legacy systems, well-documented consolidation logic helps avoid confusion and delays.
- Culture matters. Getting buy-in from local teams, especially after restructuring or system changes, can make or break consolidation success.
- Small wins add up. Even partial automation of currency conversion or intercompany matching can save hours every month.
The companies that handle consolidation well don’t aim for perfect from day one. They focus on building a process that’s stable, repeatable, and able to grow with the business.
And while tools help, the real advantage often comes from the clarity of structure and the discipline to stick with it.
So, if your finance team is struggling with the complexity of group reporting or month-end chaos across multiple entities, you’re not alone. Many companies face the same challenges. The good news: consolidation doesn’t need to be perfect to be valuable – it just needs to be consistent, clear, and well-structured.
Đurđica Polimac is a former marketer turned product manager, passionate about building impactful SaaS products and fostering connections through compelling content.
