Multi-company groups
Written by someone who has done a group month-end.
A group running several companies is not a vertical we picked from a list — it is a shape. The problems below come with that shape whatever you sell, and they are the reason generic accounts payable tools get bought by groups and then quietly abandoned.
The reality
Six things that are true in almost every group.
One group, several ledgers
Each site or company runs its own Xero organisation, and the group-wide view lives in a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds every month. Consolidation is a person, not a system.
Delivery notes that never arrive
The delivery note stays on site. The invoice arrives at the office weeks later with nothing to check it against, so it gets approved on the strength of the supplier being a supplier you use.
Credit notes nobody chases
Short deliveries, rejected stock, damaged goods. Each one is worth chasing on the day and worthless to chase a month later, so a group writes off a recurring cost it never sees on a report.
Price drift between order and invoice
A price agreed in a supplier negotiation, and a price on the line four months later. Nothing compares the two unless someone opens both, and nobody opens both.
Per-site P&L that arrives too late to act on
A site P&L in week three of the following month tells a GM about a problem they can no longer do anything about. It is a report rather than a control.
GP that moves without an explanation
Gross profit drops two points and the group knows it dropped. Finding out which line item did it means going back through invoices by hand, which is why it usually gets attributed to waste and left there.
Five sites, five companies, five Xero organisations — to Finio that is one group: every site and every ledger in one place, one close, with cross-charges posted between the companies. If your group runs many sites inside one company, that mode is being built — tell us on the call and we will be straight about timing.
The month
Where the first week actually goes.
- 01Days one to three go to statementsEvery supplier's statement, against every site's ledger, by hand. This is where a multi-site close diverges from a single-site one.
- 02Days four to six go to queriesThe gaps the statements exposed. Missing invoices, unapplied credits, duplicates — each one a phone call, and each one about something that happened five weeks ago.
- 03Reporting gets what is leftThe part the business actually needs runs last, in the time remaining, by the person who has spent a week on data entry.
Statement reconciliation moved from around two days to one to two hours, measured in a sandbox entity at live volume.
Why generic tools stop short
Four assumptions that do not hold here.
They capture the header
Supplier, date, total, VAT. Fine for posting a bill, useless for category spend, cost of sales or GP.
They assume one site
Site allocation becomes a manual field, and a manual field across hundreds of documents a month is an error rate.
They stop at the ledger
The bill is posted and the tool's job is done. Statements, credit notes, prepayments and intercompany are all after that line.
They meter what you use most
Volume is the thing a group has. Per-document pricing turns the busiest sites into the most expensive ones.