Group statements without a consolidation engine
Achekam cannot consolidate a group. How to prepare consolidated statements outside it, load the result, and run the group audit side in Achekam.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
A client grows. The trading company sets up a property company to hold its premises, then buys most of a supplier, and suddenly the year-end conversation includes the words "group statements". For the firm, that means eliminations, non-controlling interests and a set of statements that no single ledger produces.
The first thing practices ask about Achekam in this situation is whether it consolidates. It does not. Achekam has no engine that consolidates the accounts of a group of businesses, and its own capability catalogue lists group consolidation as not built. Better to know that when the work is planned than in the week before the deadline. This piece covers what consolidation involves, what Achekam can still do for a group, and a sensible way to prepare group statements in the meantime.
What consolidation involves
Consolidated statements present a parent and the entities it controls as if they were one economic entity. Under full IFRS, the control principle decides which entities are in; the IFRS Foundation's summary of IFRS 10 explains that principle and when a parent must prepare consolidated financial statements. IFRS for SMEs covers the same ground in its own section on consolidated and separate statements.
The mechanics will be familiar to anyone who has done them by hand:
- Combine the line items of the parent and each subsidiary, after aligning accounting policies and reporting dates.
- Eliminate the parent's investment against each subsidiary's equity at acquisition, recognising goodwill or a gain on a bargain purchase.
- Eliminate intragroup balances and transactions: management fees, intercompany loans, rent between the trading and property companies, and unrealised profit in stock or assets sold within the group.
- Attribute profit and equity between the owners of the parent and non-controlling interests where the parent owns less than the whole of a subsidiary.
None of that sits in any one trial balance. It is a layer of adjustments that exists only at group level.
What Achekam does not do
Because there is no consolidation engine, Achekam will not:
- add the entities' trial balances together;
- post or track elimination entries across entities;
- calculate goodwill, or the non-controlling interest's share of profit and equity.
Plan the engagement on that basis. The consolidation workings will be prepared outside Achekam, by the team, in a workbook the firm controls and reviews like any other working paper.
Keeping the group's entities together as one client group
What Achekam does offer is a tidy way to keep the group's records together. Staff can create a client group and add its entities, and the Client Groups and Client Entities screens show each group with its entities and their engagement counts. For a group engagement, that gives the team one place to see every company in the structure and the engagements running for each.
Each entity's own statements are still prepared in the usual way: a trial balance per company, mapped, and built into a draft set in the Studio. Many groups need those individual sets anyway, for each company's own filing and tax.
Preparing the consolidation outside and loading the result
A workable routine, the one many firms used long before software offered anything else:
- Finalise each entity's trial balance in Achekam first, so the figures you consolidate are the ones each company's statements will show.
- Build the consolidation workbook: a column per entity, then elimination and adjustment columns, then the consolidated column. Reference every elimination to its evidence, such as intercompany confirmations and the acquisition calculation.
- Agree intercompany balances before eliminating them. Differences between the two sides are usually cut-off or cash in transit; resolve them rather than forcing them out.
- Produce a consolidated trial balance from the workbook, with account names that describe group balances, including goodwill and the non-controlling interest.
- Load it as a trial balance of its own. Achekam reads a trial balance from an Excel workbook, a CSV file or a PDF that has a text layer. Map it, approving each suggestion as you would for a single company, and let the Studio build the draft set.
Then review the draft as a group set, not a company set. Check that the presentation shows what group statements need, such as profit and equity attributable to owners of the parent and to non-controlling interests. Where a line the group needs is missing, a firm can add its own statement lines and groups; check how they total, because each custom line still totals into a standard line. Keep the consolidation workbook with the engagement's working papers so a reviewer can trace every consolidated figure back to the entities and the eliminations.
Two cautions. The consolidated trial balance is a working paper, not a ledger, so any change the team makes to it must be traced back to the workbook. And next year starts from the workbook, not from Achekam, because the eliminations exist nowhere else.
Auditing a group: components and instructions
Where the group statements are audited, Achekam does support the group audit side. In the Group Audit Control Tower, staff record each component with its scope, materiality and component auditor, and issue instructions. Each component auditor works through a portal link to acknowledge the instructions, upload deliverables and report misstatements. The token in that link is the only credential, so send it only to the named component auditor and treat it like a key.
That suits the way ISA 600 (Revised) expects a group engagement team to work: deciding which components need work, communicating clearly with component auditors and evaluating what they report. Scoping questions are covered in scoping a group audit, and the client-side records in client groups and entities.
Before the next group year end
Agree with the client early which entities are in the group, who prepares each trial balance and when intercompany balances will be confirmed. Then set up the client group in Achekam, schedule each entity's statements, and build the consolidation workbook template before any figures arrive. The consolidation itself stays a manual, reviewed piece of work for now; everything around it can run in the usual way.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
