Who this is for
Nobody in a multi-entity group asks the same question of the same figure.
Four jobs, four shapes of group, and the pairing decides what the work is. A treasurer funds a day; a controller closes a period. In a hotel group both of them are waiting on card settlements that land days after the night they belong to. One system underneath, eight ways in.
Two lists, one product
Why two lists instead of one?
Your job decides which question you ask. The shape of the group decides how hard it is to answer. Knowing one tells you nothing about the other, which is why a single list of eight loses half the room.
By role, the question is what you are answering for this morning: a day to fund, a number to defend upward, a period to close, one process to run in every country the group books in.
By shape, the question is what has to be true before any of that is possible: how many sets of books, how many banking relationships, how many calendars, and how the money arrives in the first place.
By shape of group
- Multi-entity groups However many companies there are, consolidated without re-keying.
- Multi-country operations Different banks, formats, currencies and cut-offs. One position.
- Hotel groups Property-level cash, card settlements and one group view.
- Retail and franchise High-volume takings reconciled to the day, store by store.
Read one of each. The role page describes your day; the shape page describes the work underneath it.
The intersection
Which two of these am I?
Everyone is one of each, and the pair decides where the difficulty sits. Four of them below, and the product does not change between them.
- A treasurer in a multi-country operation
- The question is the same everywhere: what can move today. What the shape adds is that today is four cut-offs, five currencies and a bank holiday somebody else is having. A position that does not also name the accounts still to report is not one you can fund from.
- A controller in a hotel group
- The close is the close. Here it waits on card settlements: the night’s takings arrive days later, net of fees and batched across properties, so the bank and the ledger agree only once somebody has taken those batches apart.
- A CFO of a retail or franchise network
- The job is to defend a number upward. The shape adds volume — thousands of small takings a day, store by store, behind one line of the board pack. That line holds only if it opens down to the day and the store.
- A shared service center in a multi-entity group
- One team books for every company in the group. Those companies share neither a bank, nor a file format, nor a chart of accounts, so the work is one process that has to survive all three.
None of those four is a different product. What the shape changes is what has to be true before the role’s question can be answered at all, and that part is the same reconciliation engine in every one of them.
What changes
What is different on Monday morning?
The same four things, whichever of the eight pages you came from.
- The position is already assembled
- The banks’ files are read as they arrive, each movement is dated by the day the money is actually available, and every line is matched against the ledger. Nobody opens the day by downloading anything.
- What reaches a person is the exception
- Movements that settle are settled. What arrives in front of somebody is the handful the engine could not close, with the explanations it weighed, the score it gave each one and the signal that disagreed.
- Every figure carries the record behind it
- A number you have sent upward opens down to the statement line and the ledger entry it came from. That is what makes it defensible in the meeting after the meeting.
- The next entity is a configuration
- One more company, one more bank, one more calendar. It joins the same reconciled reality every company already onboarded is in, and nothing is re-keyed to make it fit.
Four readers and four shapes of group, and the only difference between them is which part of that morning they open.
Size and fit
How many entities does it take?
The count is not what decides it. What decides it is whether somebody spends the first hour of the day assembling a figure by hand, and that happens to one company in one country and to a group with subsidiaries on three continents alike. What is below is what makes a group hard, not a bar you have to clear.
What has to line up — at any size
There is no floor here and no ceiling. One company in one country and a group with subsidiaries on three continents differ in scale rather than in kind: the same four things have to line up before anybody can trust a group figure, and making them line up is the whole job.
- Legal entities
- Each keeps its own books and closes on its own schedule, and each has its own idea of what counts as a single movement.
- Countries
- Every one brings a working week, a holiday calendar and a cut-off hour that belong to it alone.
- Banking relationships
- Every bank sends a different format, on a different rhythm, and leaves different things out of it.
- Currencies held
- Every figure that crosses one has to be translated at a rate your auditor can reproduce afterwards.
A group whose shape is not on this list is not a different product. Logistics operators, real-estate portfolios, energy groups and manufacturers run the same modules; what changes is which one they open first.
Before you choose
The five questions that decide fit.
- 01Who actually uses a treasury system day to day?
- Four people, and they open different screens. The treasurer opens the morning position and funds the day from it. The CFO opens the group figure and the trail behind it. The controller opens the close, where the bank and the ledger have to agree. The shared service center runs one process for every entity, whichever country it books in.
- 02Do the CFO and the treasurer see different numbers?
- They see different cuts of one number. The position a treasurer funds from and the figure a CFO defends upward are the same reconciled total read at different levels: group, country, entity, account. There is nothing to reconcile between the two, because neither is a second copy.
- 03We operate in one country. Is this only for multi-country groups?
- No. A single-country group has the same hard part: several legal entities, several banks, several file formats, and both legs of every movement the group makes to itself. Multiple countries add calendars, cut-offs and currencies on top of that. They do not create it.
- 04We are a hotel group operating in five countries. Which page is ours?
- Both, and they answer different questions. The hotel-group page is about how the money arrives: per property, in card settlements, days after the night it belongs to. The multi-country page is about what happens to it afterwards, across five calendars and however many currencies. Read the shape page for the work and the role page for your own day.
- 05Does each role need its own setup?
- No. One system, one reconciled set of figures, and permissions decide what each person opens and what they can approve. A treasurer and a controller looking at the same entity are looking at the same records.
Start with whoever has the worst morning.
Bring one month of statements and one extract from your ERP. We will run your own group through the screens that reader actually opens, including the lines that do not reconcile.
One session, whichever page brought you here. Nothing has to be connected to your banks to run it.