Multi-Entity Trial Balance Consolidator

The problem this kills

You run a group of legal entities, and every month you have to turn their separate books into one consolidated set of numbers. So you open a giant spreadsheet. You paste in each entity's trial balance. You map every local account to the group chart of accounts by hand — the same mappings, every period, except for the new accounts someone added and forgot to tell you about. You add it all up. Then you go hunting for the inter-company transactions: the loan one entity made to another, the management fee, the inter-company sales — and you net them out so the group doesn't look like it sold things to itself. If any entity keeps its books in another currency, you translate it at this month's rates. And the whole time, your one job is to make those eliminations net to exactly zero, because if they don't, your consolidated balance sheet doesn't balance and you start the hunt all over again.

It is slow, it is fragile, and a single fat-fingered mapping or a stale FX rate quietly throws off the whole group. Worse, next month you do it all again from scratch, and the detail that explains how you got there lives in a tab you'll struggle to reconstruct when the auditors ask.

This is exactly the kind of rules-based, high-stakes assembly that a small internal tool does far better than a spreadsheet — and you do not need to be a developer to build it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for your group close. You import each entity's trial balance as a CSV, and the tool holds a reusable account map from every entity's local accounts to your group chart of accounts — so next month it remembers the mapping and only asks about accounts it hasn't seen before. AI combines the mapped balances into a group trial balance, applies the inter-company elimination pairs you defined, translates any foreign-currency entity at the rates you set, and — if you have minority owners — splits out non-controlling interest. It checks that every elimination nets to zero and flags anything that doesn't.

The group controller opens one screen, sees the consolidated trial balance with every elimination laid out, can drill from any group line back down to the contributing entities, edits or excludes an elimination that looks wrong, and clicks Approve. Only then does the tool produce the consolidated trial balance, the consolidated statements, and a clean eliminations schedule you can hand to the auditors.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how many entities you consolidate, what each one's chart of accounts looks like, how your trial balances are shaped and named, which inter-company relationships you eliminate, what currencies are in play and which rate you use for which accounts, and whether you have non-controlling interests — and then tailors the data model, the mappings, the eliminations, and every later step to your answers. This is a build shaped around your group, not a generic template.

From there it walks the agent through the database schema, the trial-balance imports with their duplicate guards, the reusable account map, the consolidation-and-elimination engine, the FX translation, the controller's review-and-approve screen with entity-level drill-down, and the export of the consolidated trial balance, statements, and eliminations schedule. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. Because the whole thing runs on CSV in and clean CSV out, you can build and use it this weekend even if nothing connects directly to your accounting systems.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This produces the numbers your group reports on, so it is built like it matters: login so only your finance team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own group's data, and a complete audit trail of every import, mapping change, elimination, edit, approval, and export — who did what, and when. Nothing is final automatically: the consolidation is a draft until the group controller approves it, and approval is the hard human-in-the-loop gate. Duplicate guards on entity + account + period mean the same trial balance can't be loaded twice, and the engine refuses to call a run balanced until every elimination nets to zero and debits equal credits. Every group number stays traceable back to the entity lines that built it.

Who it's for

Group controllers, consolidation accountants, and finance managers in multi-entity organizations who consolidate by hand every month and want it to be fast, defensible, and the same every period. If you can explain how you map your accounts and which inter-company items you eliminate, you can build this.

You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and let it interview you about your group close.