How to Optimize Your Intercompany Accounting Process

Visibility within your organization’s financial processes may already be a challenge, but intercompany reconciliations pose an even greater challenge facing organizations with multiple and complex entities. In order to be a successful global organization, it’s important for the various entities to work together and share resources and materials, however it’s even more important to keep track of those dealings. Furthermore, tax regulations and laws are constantly shifting and changing, leaving it up to your office of finance to be constantly vigilant and attentive in ensuring they are up to date on the current codes. Learning one country’s tax and business laws and codes can be a complicated undertaking – juggling the regulations and codes of another country or even numerous other countries is a compounded problem.

“The effectiveness of a company’s intercompany accounting process has an impact on its speed to close, the complexity of its accounting practices, and its exposure to regulatory risk; it can create an administrative burden for accounting staff for what is essentially an internal, non-value-creating process from the shareholder perspective. Getting it wrong can have serious financial implications.”

-Optimizing the Intercompany Accounting Process, The Hackett Group, 2017

In a recent research report on optimizing your intercompany process, The Hackett Group identifies the top 3 things you should consider when transforming intercompany accounting to ensure governance of the process:

• Get past the surface symptoms: Conduct an in-depth root-cause analysis to understand the factors driving process discrepancies
• Do the necessary cleanup: To reset the baseline process measurement, reconcile or write off outstanding and ongoing intercompany imbalances
• Establish one source of truth: Finance must define a single source of truth and mandate its use to support regular intercompany communication and prevent process breakdowns

To lean more on how to optimize your intercompany accounting process, download the full research report by The Hackett Group here.