Consolidation in AX 2012 - Introduction and Pre-Requisites

I have been debating between doing consolidation in Dynamics AX or in Management Reporter. I decided to do it in AX since the setup is very basic. Below are some ideas and suggestions on where to start.

• Consolidation vs Elimination companies. You need to remember that you CANNOT post any manual entries in a consolidation company. So if you do intent to use your consolidation company as your elimination company as well, keep in mind that you won't be able to manually post eliminations. Also, a company cannot be deleted from AX 2012 (although it can in previous versions of AX), make sure to think about your consolidation structure before creating those entities in AX. 

Note: A consolidation or elimination entity is created the same way as any legal entity. I always use the data export/import function to get the basic setup in from an existing entity. The only two thing that will need to be done are number sequences wizard and ledger setup in General Ledger.

Once the entity is created, you will need to flag the company as consolidation entity or elimination entity or both. For that go to Organization administration > Setup > Organization > Legal Entities. Under the General tab you will find two flags "Use for financial consolidation process" and "Use for financial elimination process".

• Consolidation and open balances. If you have been using AX for several years but you just start to execute consolidation in AX, you will need to bring all your activity over in the consolidation company in order to get your open balances. The Online consolidation doesn't have an option to bring opening balances. Opening balances will be created once you execute the year-end close process. So if you do have data like me since 1994, you will need to close almost 20 years before getting your open balances for the consolidation numbers to be correct

• Rebuild balances during consolidation process. I suggest to un-check this option as AX will schedule a job to rebuild all dimension sets you have setup. However, if you don't consolidate at the dimension level, you don't need to rebuild all dimension sets. Also, you might have to run the consolidation several times before verifying the numbers and it's faster to execute the rebuild manually in that case

• Elimination during consolidation process. If you created a different entity for the elimination then this option will not be valid for you since the proposal should be created in the elimination entity and not in the consolidation entity. Also, it's always better to verify the elimination proposal before posting it. Finally, you might need to calculate fixed amount and modify your elimination rules based on the consolidation result before being able to execute the elimination rules.

This is some food for thoughts, I will soon post more details about the consolidation process and the currency conversion. Looking forward for feedback and reviews. Enjoy!