Three companies, two currencies, one spreadsheet holding the group together.
Each of your companies keeps workable books in its own system. The trouble starts when the group needs one set of numbers: exports, rate conversions, intercompany matching, and a consolidation workbook that takes days and breaks when someone renames a column. That monthly rebuild is the problem this page is about.
—— Sound familiar?
You know this problem by these symptoms.
Month-end starts with exporting a trial balance from every entity and pasting them into a workbook only one person knows how to fix.
An intercompany invoice is booked in one company weeks before the matching entry appears in the other — and sometimes it never does.
Each entity converted at its own exchange rate, so the first hour of every consolidation is spent arguing about which rate is right.
The consolidated figures land around the 20th, describing a month everyone has already moved on from.
When the auditor asks where a group number came from, the answer is a chain of linked spreadsheets nobody dares to reopen.
This is not a discipline problem in your accounting team. Each company adopted the tool that made sense for its country, its bank and its local accountant — separately, and usually years apart. Those systems were never designed to talk to each other, so spreadsheets quietly became the integration layer, and every close redoes that integration work by hand. The group outgrew the setup; nobody chose it.
—— The way out
How Odoo closes this gap.
Every entity in one database
Odoo's multi-company setup puts each legal entity in the same database with its own chart of accounts, taxes, fiscal localisation and currency — Thai Revenue Department formats for the Thai entity, GST for the Indian one, US requirements for the American one. Accountants switch companies from the top bar; group-level users see across all of them. One login, one set of master data, separate statutory books.
Intercompany entries that book both sides
Odoo's inter-company rules mirror transactions automatically: an invoice raised by one company creates the matching draft bill in the counterpart, referencing the original document. Reconciling intercompany balances becomes a review step instead of a month-long hunt through two mailboxes.
Currency handled in the ledger, not in Excel
Odoo stores every entry in both the transaction currency and the company currency, pulls exchange rates automatically on a schedule you set, and revalues open foreign-currency balances at close so unrealised gains and losses post as journal entries. The rate question gets answered once, in configuration, instead of every month in a meeting.
Consolidated statements you can drill into
The Consolidation app in Odoo Enterprise pulls each entity's balances into a group structure, converts at the closing or average rate you define, and carries elimination entries for intercompany positions. Every consolidated figure drills down to its source journal entry — 'where did this number come from' becomes a click, not an archaeology project.
—— How we run it
The transition, managed properly.
One entity at a time
We bring entities live in sequence, starting with the one whose close hurts most, each phase with a fixed written scope and price. The group is never mid-air on every system at once.
A parallel close before any cutover
Before any old system is retired, we run at least one full month-end in both and compare the output line by line. You switch when the numbers agree, not when the calendar says so.
Balances reconciled before they migrate
Opening balances and open intercompany items move in validated batches, reconciled before import so the old mismatches stay behind. The same consultant runs this from the first call through your first consolidated close in Odoo.
—— FAQ
Questions teams ask about this problem.
How long until we can close the group in Odoo?
It depends almost entirely on the number of entities and the state of your intercompany balances, so we give a phased timeline after scoping, never before. As a shape: each entity is its own phase measured in weeks, and the first consolidated close in Odoo typically follows once two or more entities are live.
Can the entities we have not migrated yet keep their current systems?
Yes — that is how the sequencing works. Each entity keeps its existing tools until its phase, and during the transition the group close still combines both sources, so the consolidation workbook shrinks with every phase instead of disappearing overnight.
Our intercompany balances have never fully matched. Will migration expose that?
Yes, and better now than in an audit. We reconcile intercompany positions before anything is imported, document the differences that cannot be explained, and migrate agreed opening balances — so the new system starts clean instead of inheriting the argument.
What does this cost, and what needs Odoo Enterprise?
Our work is quoted as a fixed fee per phase after scoping. On licences: Odoo Community is $0, but the Consolidation app and several of the automation features on this page are Enterprise, billed per user by Odoo directly — we never mark licences up, and we will tell you plainly which entities need which edition.
Let's find out whether Odoo actually fits your business.
A short call, an honest answer. If it isn't the right system for you, we'll say so.