ERP Solutions for Business Groups & Conglomerates for Europe Business Groups

Market Landscape

A European group has to satisfy two accounting realities simultaneously. Each entity reports under its own national requirements to its own authorities in its own format, while the group consolidates to a single standard for management and, where applicable, for external reporting. Those two views of the same transactions differ in genuine ways, and a system that handles only one of them forces the other to be produced manually every period — which is precisely what most European groups are doing.

Key Challenges

The operational burden concentrates in a small central team, and it recurs every month. Intercompany transactions across borders need eliminating, and because each side records them in its own currency and sometimes at a different time, matching them is persistently difficult. Local accounting providers in each country work to their own timetables, so the group close waits for the slowest. Shared service centres, which many European groups establish to solve this, frequently inherit the problem rather than resolving it because the underlying systems and definitions were never harmonised first.

Why India Works

Harmonising a European group is a sequencing and negotiation exercise conducted across languages and jurisdictions, and it requires sustained capacity over several years. Working from India, we hold a consistent team across a multi-year programme, use the 09:00 to 14:30 CET overlap for the chart of accounts, currency and intercompany decisions that need finance people in several countries present, and run migration and configuration outside European hours. Against Western European implementation costs, the difference is frequently what determines whether a group programme reaches the smaller markets or stops after the largest two.