Multi-Branch Finance Consolidation on Business Central for Nor***** A/S, DenmarkCase Study

The immediate driver was regulatory. The Danish Bookkeeping Act requires businesses to use a digital bookkeeping system meeting specified requirements, including provisions around transaction registration and automated backup, which meant the group's existing setup was not simply inefficient but heading toward non-compliance. Underneath that sat the consolidation problem. Four branches ran on two accounting packages with different charts of accounts, so producing group figures meant exporting each branch to spreadsheets and reconciling by hand — a task that absorbed the finance team for a large part of every reporting cycle. Intercompany transactions between branches were recorded independently at each end and frequently disagreed, so closing required investigation rather than review. Danish group companies under common control are subject to mandatory national joint taxation, so the group had statutory reporting obligations that a fragmented, manually reconciled setup made genuinely risky to satisfy accurately. NemHandel e-invoicing to public sector customers was being handled through a manual workaround at each branch. The finance team was small and had lived through one failed implementation already.

We implemented Business Central across all four branches on a single tenant, and the central design decision was a standardised group-wide chart of accounts with consistent dimensions for branch-level reporting. That standardisation was negotiated up front rather than deferred, because allowing each branch to keep its existing structure would have reproduced the consolidation problem inside a new system. Intercompany transactions are automated so a posting at one branch creates its counterpart at the other, which is what makes balances reconcile without investigation. A dedicated consolidation company produces group figures from live data rather than from assembled spreadsheets. The Danish localisation handles VAT and statutory reporting, and NemHandel e-invoicing was configured to run automatically at every branch rather than as a manual step. We configured the system explicitly against the Bookkeeping Act's digital requirements, including transaction registration and backup provisions, so compliance is a property of the system rather than an interpretation of an older setup. Reporting for the joint taxation regime draws from the standardised dimensions. Historical financial data for all four branches was migrated and opening balances reconciled before go-live, followed by a parallel reporting period and a month of hypercare. Related: Business Central implementation and our manufacturing practice.