Day 12 of your monthly close. Board meeting in three days. Your senior analyst just found a reconciliation error in the intercompany eliminations. Again.

If you're a CFO managing multiple entities across different ERPs, you're living this reality every month. Your team spends 14 days consolidating manually. Your close stretches to 15-25 days. And you're one key person departure away from chaos.

The brutal truth: Your current process costs $850K+ annually in time, errors, and opportunity cost.

The good news: This is no longer inevitable.

Leading multi-entity CFOs are moving from manual Excel consolidation to purpose-built financial intelligence—in weeks, not the 6-12 months required for enterprise planning platforms or custom builds.

This guide shows you exactly how.
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What's Inside

Understanding the Competitive Landscape
You're not comparing vendors. You're competing against "Excel works fine," "we'll build it ourselves," or "isn't our ERP supposed to do this?" Learn how to position the business case against Excel, Anaplan, and custom data platform builds.

The Hidden Cost of Manual Consolidation
14 FTE-days per month. 15-25 day closes. 3-5% error rates. $850K+ annual cost. We break down where the costs hide—and how purpose-built intelligence cuts consolidation time by 86% while reducing errors to near-zero.

Why Your Data Platform Isn't a Financial Solution
"We'll build it on Fabric/Databricks in 3 months." Except it takes 12 months, costs $300K+ year one, and requires $150K+ annual maintenance forever. See the hidden complexity in ERP connectors, CoA mapping, currency translation, and intercompany elimination that data teams consistently underestimate.

Real CFO Transformation Stories
How finance leaders moved from Excel hell to automated intelligence—cutting close time from 15-25 days to 3-5 days, eliminating errors, and freeing teams for strategic analysis instead of reconciliation.

How to Evaluate Your Options
Build vs. buy framework with realistic timelines, costs, and risks. Three-year TCO comparison: Excel ($2.5M+), custom build ($845K), purpose-built solution ($450K). Plus the critical questions to ask your data team before they promise a "simple 3-month project."