April 12, 2026
Managing finances for a single entity is already a lot. Add a second entity – different country, currency, intercompany transactions – and the complexity multiplies.
For businesses going through rapid growth, this is one of the most common pain points. The reporting structure that worked perfectly well when the company was a single Australian entity starts to buckle the moment you open a US subsidiary or a New Zealand operation. Suddenly you’re running multiple Xero files, doing currency conversions manually, tracking intercompany eliminations in a spreadsheet, and somehow trying to produce a consolidated view that’s accurate and timely.
It’s one of the most common challenges in finance, and one of the most solvable.
If you’re pulling trial balances each month, pasting everything into a master consolidation spreadsheet, manually converting currencies, and eliminating intercompany transactions by hand, you’re already wasting too much time.
A 2024 QuickBooks survey found that the average business spends 25 hours a week on manual data entry and reconciling data across applications. Most organizations running multi-entity reports struggle with consolidation, and the knock-on effect goes beyond a stressful close week. When 92% of those same businesses say it’s affecting their ability to retain talent, the problem has moved from operational to existential.
The broader benchmarks paint a similar story: half of all finance teams still take six or more days to close the books, and 94% of spreadsheets in active business use contain at least one significant error.
HiSmile is a useful case study here. What started as a single e-commerce product grew into a business selling into the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Europe, with plans to expand further. Each new market brought new entities, new currencies, new intercompany transactions – and the Excel-based consolidation that worked at the start couldn’t scale with it.
“We would import from a multitude of different Xero files and consolidate them,” explains Adin Kenevan, who led the transformation of HiSmile’s reporting process. “If there was an error and something needed to be recoded, that two-minute update in Xero then takes an hour – could take two hours – to flow through the management report pack.”
The goal is simple to describe and harder to achieve: a consolidated view that updates automatically when underlying data changes, handles currency conversion consistently, manages intercompany eliminations reliably, and lets you drill down to entity level when you need it.
That means no manual imports. No separate spreadsheet for eliminations. And definitely no situation where a two-minute fix in Xero triggers two hours of downstream rework.
For HiSmile, the shift came from moving to Fathom, which connects directly to each Xero entity and handles consolidation automatically. Account mappings are set up once. Currency conversions are handled at the system level. Intercompany eliminations are configured rather than calculated manually each month. When a transaction changes in Xero, it flows through to the consolidated view without anyone touching a spreadsheet.
Fathom’s data shows that multi-entity customers save an average of twelve hours per reporting period once they automate consolidation. For a lean finance team, that’s the difference between a reporting function that’s alway sunder pressure and one that has genuine capacity to do more.
Don’t try to build the perfect setup on day one. Start by replicating what you already have. Take your existing consolidated report and rebuild it in the new platform. Run both processes side by side for one period, then compare the outputs. If they match, your mappings are right and your eliminations are working. From there you can start adding to it – better visualizations, custom KPIs, additional analysis layers – from a foundation you trust.
This approach also makes it easier to bring the rest of the business along. When directors can see the new report matches the previous one, the transition feels like an upgrade rather than a risk.
Multi-entity reporting isn’t just a challenge for businesses with international operations. It’s equally common for investment groups, holding companies, and businesses managing multiple subsidiaries under a central management entity – anywhere you need individual entity reporting alongside agroup-level view for investor reporting, board oversight, or bank compliance.
The solution scales the same way. Set up entity-level reporting first, configure the consolidation, then build the group-level view on top. Each entity gets its own template. The group gets a separate consolidated view. Both update from the same underlying data – no duplication, no reconciliation, no risk of the individual entities and the consolidated view telling different stories.
Multi-entity reporting doesn’t have to be the hardest thing finance does every month. With the right infrastructure, it can be one of the most reliable.
To hear more about HiSmile’s multi-entity reporting, watch the full Ask an Expert Session with Adin Kenavan.
Ready to see how Fathom can help with multi-entity reporting? Start your free trial.
Ellie is a campaign marketing manager at Fathom, with a degree in branding and marketing. With a background in campaign strategy and creation, Ellie is passionate about showcasing how Fathom can make a real difference to finance professionals and businesses.
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