A group of companies

Menu: Accounts → Group · Reporting → Reports → Group Who: whoever Sellify has been asked to let read the group — usually the owner or the group's accountant. They must already have May read the books in their own company.

Some owners run more than one company: a chain of shops and the warehouse that supplies them, each registered separately, each with its own bank account and its own tax return. Each company keeps its own books in Sellify as before. The group is where they are read together, as one business, with the trade between them taken out.

You need The books at every company, and Group of companies in your package (Enterprise). Sellify puts the companies into a group for you: ask us, and say from which day each one counts. Every company in a group must use the same currency and start its financial year in the same month.

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What you see

Accounts → Group lists the companies in the group, the day each one joined, when its books begin and the last month it has filed. Below that is the Group year-end pack (see further down).

Nobody can post anything from here. Every figure is read from each company's own books, inside that company, so the group shows nothing a company's own screens could not.

Saying which customer or supplier is one of your own companies

When one of your companies sells to another, each records it the ordinary way: the seller rings a sale to a customer, the buyer receives a delivery from a supplier. For the group to know that the two are the same trade, tell each side who the other really is:

• On the seller's Khata, open the customer's terms and pick Company in our group.
• On the buyer's Suppliers screen, edit the supplier and pick Company in our group.

Only whoever keeps the books can set this. The picker only appears when your company is in a group.

The group's statements

Reporting → Reports → Group has:

• Group trial balance — each company's own trial balance in a column of its own, the eliminations beside them, and the group total.
• Group income statement, Group balance sheet, Group cash flow and Group statement of changes in equity — the same statements you know from one company, with a column per company. Each can be set beside the period before.
• Inter-company reconciliation — see below.

A company counts from the day it joined the group. What it earned before then is shown as brought forward, not as the group's profit for the year.

What is taken out

Selling to yourself is not a sale. When the warehouse sells the shops Rs 400,000 of rice, the group as a whole has not earned anything, and the Rs 400,000 the shops owe the warehouse is not a debt to anybody outside. So the group takes out:

• the sales one company made to another, together with the same amount of cost of sales; and
• what one company is owed by another, together with what the other owes.

Each is taken out at the lower of the two sides. If the warehouse has billed Rs 470,000 and the shops have only booked in Rs 360,000 so far — the rest is still on the van — Rs 360,000 is taken out and the other Rs 110,000 is shown as a difference on the Inter-company reconciliation. Sellify never quietly absorbs a difference; it is there for somebody to look at.

Profit still sitting in a company's stock on goods it bought from another group company is not taken out, and the statements say so.

Accounts that do not line up

Two companies' charts of accounts usually match: Sellify's own accounts match everywhere, and accounts with the same code and type match too. An account that matches nothing is shown on the group trial balance under Unmapped, with the company's name, until it is lined up. Sellify does the lining up for you on request; until it is done, the group's year-end pack cannot be signed.

The group year-end pack

At the foot of Accounts → Group is the Group year-end pack: the group's five statements, then each company's own five, then the notes — the group's accounting policies, what was taken out, the inter-company reconciliation and each company's fixed asset register — as one PDF with a cover and a contents page.

It works exactly like a single company's pack (see Closing a month, and the year): write the Accounting policies, read the Draft PDF, and once every month of the year is closed at every company and nothing is unmapped, Sign the pack. A signed pack is frozen. If any company reopens a month of that year afterwards, the pack is marked Superseded, naming the company and the month, and a new one is signed.