IMPLEMENTATION OF A UNIFIED IFRS/US GAAP CONSOLIDATION/REPORTING SOLUTION

The company turned to Becouze as part of the process of bringing its consolidation department in-house, to implement a customised software solution capable of:

• Produce its regulatory consolidated financial information and its management accounts in compliance with both standards, within optimised timeframes, without compromising the quality or reliability of the data,
• Integrate numerous sector-specific features, non-GAAP measures (MPM), an income statement by function/business unit (BU) and a cash flow statement based on EBITDA,
• Provide various types of comparable information and performance analysis (in particular concerning constant scope and exchange rates, budget and forecast).

Identifying your needs to better satisfy them

The first stage is always the most structuring. It consists of clearly identifying the client’s needs from different angles:

• Analysis of the consolidated financial statements and notes,
• Analysis of Corporate “Management accounts” reporting,
• Analysis of local charts of accounts,
• Analysis of consolidation histories and identification of the nature of restatements,
• Analysis of the differences in accounting treatment between local standards and IFRS,
• Analysis of the differences in standards and the presentation of financial statements between IFRS and US GAAP,
• Organisation of working groups to define specific parameters: P&L by function, sectoral analysis, new accounts and flows to individualise the impact of certain transactions, IFRS versus US rules, review of alternative performance measurement indicators, review of target reporting statements (IFRS, US GAAP and Management), etc.

This analysis time is essential to the success of this type of project. Once the objectives and deliverables have been clearly defined, the mission proceeds much more smoothly, even if adjustments can always be made during the implementation phase.

Remaining proactive and anticipating needs

Implementing a unified reporting solution necessarily involves making certain trade-offs, the consequences of which are not always easy to measure. The dual IT/business skills of our teams greatly facilitated exchanges with the various departments and enabled the client to make the necessary choices with a full understanding of the organisational challenges and impacts. This also facilitated both regulatory (IFRS and US GAAP) and internal (Management Accounts) reporting, while guaranteeing perfect symmetry of indicators.

As well as making decisions to harmonise and unify the information reporting, our teams also proposed effective solutions to automate data collection as much as possible, without compromising reliability, by intelligently customised controls.

Finally, throughout the mission, we tried to:

• Always think about the end user in the design of the solution and the collection, but also in the ergonomics and translation, so that requests and instructions are as clear and intelligible for the contributor based in France as they are for their international counterparts,
• Make the parameterisation as dynamic as possible in order to guarantee our client a high degree of autonomy in future adaptations of the reporting (external growth, new accounts, new BUs, new areas of analysis, new comparable information, etc.).