Group Audit & Consolidation lets you produce a consolidated set of group accounts inside BrightWorkpapers, instead of building a consolidated trial balance by hand in Excel and importing it back into a file. BrightWorkpapers reads the trial balances from the audit files across your group, rolls them up automatically, and gives you a consolidated view you can review and trace.

This article explains what the feature does and introduces the key terms you'll see throughout the rest of these guides. It applies to all regions (UK, Ireland/EU and Australia).

What's new

Before this release, preparing group accounts meant creating a consolidated trial balance outside BrightWorkpapers, importing the resulting CSV into a file, and customising the template so it displayed in a group-compatible format. That approach was time-consuming and hard to validate.

Now you can:

• Create a dedicated Group Audit engagement file against the group's top-level client.
• Let BrightWorkpapers identify the entities and files in your group automatically, using your existing client group structure.
• Run the consolidation as a background job and review the results in dedicated consolidated views.
• Keep a clear audit trail of who ran each consolidation and when.

Regular (non-group) audit files are unaffected and continue to work exactly as before.

Key terms

Understanding a few terms will make the rest of these guides much clearer.

Group — a set of related client entities that you need to report on together. The relationships between them are arranged as a hierarchy that reflects your clients' legal or reporting structure.

Ultimate Parent — the top-level client in the group. This is the reporting entity for the consolidated accounts, and it's the client the group file is created against. Only clients set up with an Ultimate Parent relationship can have a Group Audit file created for them.

Parent — an intermediate client that controls one or more subsidiaries, while itself sitting beneath the Ultimate Parent.

Subsidiary — a client whose accounts are included in the consolidated group accounts.

Group Audit file — the engagement file created against the Ultimate Parent for a particular financial period. This is where the consolidation runs and where you review the consolidated results.

Consolidation — the process of rolling up the trial balances from the audit files across your group into a single consolidated set of accounts for the Ultimate Parent.

How the feature fits together

At a high level, working with a group follows four stages:

1. Set up the group — your clients are arranged into a group hierarchy, with an Ultimate Parent at the top.
2. Create a Group Audit file — you create the engagement file against the Ultimate Parent for the reporting period.
3. Run the consolidation — BrightWorkpapers pulls in the eligible audit files across the group and rolls them up in the background.
4. Review the results — you check the consolidated Trial Balance and Consolidation Breakdown, and trace how figures rolled up.

The remaining articles in this section walk through each of these in turn.

Related articles

• Setting up a Group Audit engagement file
• Understanding the consolidated Trial Balance and Consolidation Breakdown
• Running and tracking a group consolidation