Multi-Site Consolidation for Healthcare Businesses
Growth brings opportunity and stronger market presence, but it can also bring more complexity. As your organisation expands with more sites, inefficient processes such as spreadsheet-based consolidation become increasingly difficult to manage.
Whether you’re consolidating a group of care homes, private clinics, research laboratories or anything else, what worked well when there were only a handful of sites, quickly starts to break down when there are dozens or more.
In this article, we’ll explore the true cost of spreadsheet-driven consolidation and practical ways you can simplify the process.
Lost Time & Resources
The biggest and most obvious cost of spreadsheet-based consolidation is the time it takes to manually gather and prepare the data.
Before reporting can even begin, finance teams need to gather data from multiple locations, chase missing information, validate figures and convert data into a format suitable for consolidation.
Some entities and locations may present their data in slightly different formats, due to having different processes, software or charts of accounts. Converting everything into a single format makes preparing the data even more time-consuming.
All those hours of chasing, copying, pasting and editing takes up time that could’ve been spent analysing data and interpreting it for strategic decision-making.
Increased Risk of Errors
Spreadsheet-based consolidation relies heavily on human intervention, which increases the risk of mistakes such as typos, miscalculations and broken formulas.
Version control presents another risk of errors, as members of the team may be working from different versions. Multiple copies get emailed around and local versions can be downloaded and edited, making it difficult to know which version is up to date and whether you can really trust the numbers.
As organisations grow, these risks continue to grow too. Missing a mistake can cause issues for budgeting, forecasting, auditing and compliance, especially in regulated sectors such as healthcare.
Delayed Insights
A common frustration with manual consolidation is that the insights often arrive too late.
By the time data has been gathered, consolidated and it’s ready to share, the organisation has already moved on. Decisions have been delayed, opportunities missed and emerging issues left unnoticed.
For multi-site care providers, timely visibility is particularly important. If one site is underperforming, finance teams need the ability to identify those trends quickly. The sooner issues are recognised; the sooner action can be taken.
Modern finance teams need a way to consolidate quickly, while insights are still relevant.
Restricted Growth
Many of the UK’s most successful healthcare organisations operate extensive portfolios, making expanding into new locations almost essential for remaining competitive.
For teams managing consolidation manually, each new site means more reports to collect and more data to validate and consolidate. As time-consuming processes and delayed insights hold you back, growth stands still.
If you want to successfully run multiple sites and entities, you need an efficient way to manage financial consolidation.
Ways to Simplify Financial Consolidation
There are several practical steps you can take to start working towards a more efficient and scalable consolidation process today:
- Connect all your data sources into a centralised data repository to make gathering the data quicker and easier.
- Standardise reporting and data entry processes to ensure consistency across the organisation and make consolidation easier.
- Use an automated currency conversion tool to ensure you’re using the latest exchange rates and eliminate calculation errors.
- Introduce financial consolidation automation software to reduce manual tasks and strengthen control over the process.
Even small improvements can significantly reduce the administrative burden placed on finance teams, while increasing confidence in the numbers being reported.
Sage Intacct Financial Consolidation
Sage Intacct automates the whole financial consolidation process, handling everything from currency conversions to inter-company eliminations for you. All it takes is a few clicks and your consolidation is done in minutes.
There are 3 types of consolidation in Sage Intacct, Domestic, Global and Advanced Ownership:
- Domestic: For those with multiple entities or locations in the same country.
- Global: Uses the latest exchange rates to consolidate all your global entities and locations into a single base currency.
- Advanced Ownership: For global organisations with complex and partial ownership structures.
Sage Intacct doesn’t just handle consolidation, its multi-entity structure enables you to efficiently manage all financial aspects of your entities, locations and subsidiaries from one place, including real-time dashboards, automating inter-company transactions and more.
Sage Intacct Partner for Multi-Entity Businesses
We don’t just implement Sage; we build long-term partnerships with our clients to help them see value from their investment year after year.
We achieve this by hiring the best talent, providing free training resources via our Customer Portal, offering additional modules and custom development, and making day-to-day technical support easily accessible.
From care homes, home care and hospices to medtech, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, we’ve had years of experience working with the healthcare industry.
We currently support various multi-site healthcare organisations as they continue to grow and expand into new locations and territories, including Medical Research Network and Gold Care Homes. Find out more about them below.
Medical Research Network
A clinical trials organisation with offices in the US, Spain, Germany, France and Japan.
Read how we helped MRN migrate from Sage 200 to Sage Intacct, revolutionising their reporting processes.
Gold Care Homes
A group of care homes and nursing homes with over 40 locations across the UK.
Explore how migrating from Sage 50 to Sage Intacct has helped Gold Care Homes unlock further growth.
Financial Consolidation FAQs
How does financial consolidation work in Sage Intacct?
When you first get started with consolidation in Sage Intacct, you set up what’s called a consolidation book. This tells the system how you’d like your data to be consolidated, including details such as currency conversion, exceptions, base currencies, inter-entity elimination and more. Once set up, all you do is run consolidation and allow the system to do the rest.
What is the most accurate method to handle financial consolidation?
The most accurate way to handle financial consolidation is by using specialist consolidation tools which automate a lot of the processes, including intercompany eliminations and currency conversions. This is more accurate than manually consolidating in spreadsheets, as it reduces human-error.
What are the benefits of automating financial consolidation?
The benefits of automating financial consolidation include:
- Saves time and reduces workload
- Cuts down the risk of mistakes
- Supports proactive decision-making
- Makes compliance easier
Written by: Jessica Allen, Marketing Executive at PKF Smith Cooper Systems
Reviewed by: Nicholas Collyer, Sage Intacct Solutions Consultant at PKF Smith Cooper Systems
Last updated: September 2026
