Case study
Private Equity & Portfolio Value Creation89%
of portfolio consolidation automated end to end
89% of portfolio consolidation, automated without losing the audit trail
A private equity firm consolidated monthly numbers from portfolio companies running different ERPs, different charts of accounts, and different ideas of what a closed month means. We built the system that does the mechanical 89% of that work and leaves the judgment calls, clearly flagged, to the finance team.
Situation
A close process built on spreadsheets and heroics
Every month, portfolio-company controllers exported trial balances into templates, the fund's finance team re-mapped them by hand into the group structure, and the cycle ended in a rush of reconciliation emails. Every acquisition made it worse: a new chart of accounts, new intercompany relationships, another spreadsheet in the chain.
The cost was not only hours. Numbers arrived late enough that operating partners were steering last month's portfolio, and every manual hop was a place for an error to hide until an LP report or an audit found it.
The build
What we built
A consolidation pipeline that treats each portfolio company's ledger as a data source with a contract, not a spreadsheet to be reshaped by hand.
Entity and account mapping
Models learn each company's chart of accounts and map it to the group structure, with every mapping decision stored, versioned, and reviewable. New acquisitions onboard in days, not quarters.
Anomaly and completeness checks
Balances that break their own history, intercompany positions that do not net out, and late or missing feeds are flagged before consolidation runs, not discovered after distribution.
Audit-ready lineage
Every consolidated figure traces back through each transformation to the source ledger line. The answer to 'where did this number come from' is a click, not an archaeology project.
Deployment
How it deployed
The finance team kept its review workflow; the system took over the assembly underneath it. The 11% that stays human is the 11% that should: judgment on adjustments, eliminations that need context, and the final sign-off. Nothing posts without a named person approving it.
Rollout went portfolio company by portfolio company, starting with the two messiest ledgers on the theory that if the system survived those, the rest would be routine. It did.
Results
Results
Measured across the full reporting cycle after the last portfolio company was onboarded.
- 89%
- of the consolidation workload automated end to end
- 100%
- of consolidated figures traceable to source ledger lines
- Days
- not weeks, from portfolio close to consolidated numbers
- 0
- restatements attributable to mapping errors since go-live
From the fund's finance lead
“The month still closes with people making judgment calls. It just no longer closes with people retyping numbers at midnight. Our auditors like it more than we do, and we like it a lot.”
Discuss your consolidation cycle
If your close still runs on templates and heroics, we will map your reporting chain and tell you which share of it a system should own, and what that buys you in days and errors.