How do I customize an Intercompany Reconciliation template?

  • Article

You can use intercompany reconciliation to make sure that transactions between partner entities do not cause issues when you create consolidated financial reports. Problems might occur, for example, when an internal entity records a different amount for a sale than the buyer entity reports for the purchase. Intercompany reconciliation provides a mechanism that can help you analyze such errors and identify necessary adjustments.

Modelers can customize intercompany reconciliation rules to fit a particular business scenario. This how-to topic provides guidelines that can help a modeler develop customized business rules for intercompany reconciliation.

What you can do when you finish

When you examine the results of an intercompany (IC) reconciliation job, you can locate differences between partner entities. Because the IC process automatically makes reconciliation entries, you can easily review these entries and decide whether ledger adjustments are appropriate to resolve the differences.

To verify that your adjustments successfully reconciled the differences, reload the data and run the IC reconciliation job again. When the IC process no longer makes reconciliation entries, you can be certain that no additional IC transaction differences exist. When all differences are resolved to your satisfaction, you are ready to run consolidation.

Prerequisites

This how-to procedure assumes that you have completed the following prerequisites:

  • You have Modeler permissions.

  • Your model includes the Intercompany dimension.

    For more information, see About the Intercompany dimension.

  • You have configured Entity dimension members that might have intercompany transactions with property Intercompany = TRUE.

    For more information, see About the Entity dimension.

  • You have ensured that all accounts in the scope of the reconciliation have property Intercompany = TRUE.

    For more information, see About the Account dimension.

  • If your model includes the Flow dimension, accounts of type Income Statement have a Flow member of NONE.

    For more information, see About the Flow dimension.

  • If your model includes entities that use different currencies, your model is linked with an appropriate Exchange Rate assumption model. In addition, you have loaded exchange rate data for the time period of interest into the Exchange Rate model.

  • You have loaded transaction data for the period of interest into the Financial model.

  • You have correct values at hand for the following dimensional member specifications:

    • Entity(s) that is the buyer for the intercompany transaction.

    • Entity(s) that is the seller for the intercompany transaction.

    • Account member(s) and related hierarchy in which the buyer intercompany transaction occurred.

    • Account member(s) and related hierarchy in which the seller intercompany transaction occurred.

    • Account member(s) and related hierarchy that are used for the reconciliation offset account. Note that this account must have property Intercompany = TRUE.

    • Account member(s) and related hierarchy that are used for the reconciliation balancing account. This account must have property Intercompany = FALSE.

Customizing an Intercompany Reconciliation template

Use the steps in the following table to track your progress.

Step Task Topic

1.

Review the description of an intercompany reconciliation to gain an overview of the process.

Intercompany reconciliation rules

2.

Review the security requirements for a Modeler role. To perform intercompany reconciliation, you must have Modeler permissions.

Scope of permission for the Modeler role

3.

Open the model.

Open, close, and save a model site

4.

Click the Business Rules tab, and create a rule set named Intercompany Reconciliation RuleSet at the root level.

Intercompany (IC) Reconciliation rules must belong to a rule set with this name. If IC Reconciliation rules belong to a different rule set, jobs that use the rules will fail.

Creating a new rule set

5.

Create a new rule with the following settings:

  • Select the Use template or copy from existing rule check box.

  • In the Template drop-down list, select one of the following options:

    • If your model does not have a Flow dimension, select Intercompany Reconciliation without Flows.

    • If your model has a Flow dimension, select Intercompany Reconciliation with Flows.

Creating a new rule

6.

In the Rule expression pane, right-click to display the shortcut menu, and then click Fill Template Placeholders. The Fill Template Placeholders dialog box opens.

For each placeholder in the Placeholders grid, select a value.

When you finish selecting values for all placeholders, click OK.

Filling a placeholder in a rule template

7.

In the Rule Grid pane, select the rule that you just completed. Validate the rule.

Validating a rule, rule set, or all rules

8.

Save the rule.

Open, close, and save a model site

9.

Deploy the rules and variables.

Deploying rules and variables

Next steps

After you write and validate your intercompany reconciliation rule, you can do one or more of the following:

  • Run a job that uses the rule from Planning Business Modeler. For more information about IC Reconciliation jobs, see Predefined job templates.

  • Run a job from PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel, and then build a report.

  • Schedule the job in the Planning Business Modeler workspace.

    For information about scheduling a job that runs your rule, see Schedule a job.

To create a report that uses the results of an Intercompany (IC) Reconciliation rule, a user who is not a modeler must be assigned to the associated IC reconciliation job.

See Also

Other Resources

Customizing business rules