Netgain's Consolidation Beta: What Multi-Entity Small Businesses Should Fix Before Their Books Outgrow Spreadsheets

Your second entity was supposed to be simple. A holding company here, an operating company there, maybe a property LLC you added later. Now month-end means exporting three trial balances into a workbook only you understand, hunting a $4,000 intercompany difference that has to net to zero but never does, and sending leadership a consolidated profit figure you cannot fully explain. The business did not get twenty times more complicated — but the close got twenty days longer, because the spreadsheet became the system.

That bottleneck is exactly what accounting software vendor Netgain is aiming at. On June 30, 2026, the company announced an open beta for a new consolidation accounting software product and began recruiting a founding cohort of accounting leaders to shape it. Beta teams work directly with Netgain's product team through the end of 2026, ahead of a planned release in the first quarter of 2027. Whether or not you ever touch the product, the announcement is a useful forcing function: consolidation is one of the last corners of accounting still stuck on spreadsheets, and the pain points Netgain names are a diagnostic checklist for your own close.

What Netgain actually announced​

The announcement is modest in scope, which is part of its credibility. There is no general release yet — just a beta program enrolling a limited group of customers and partners, aimed at multi-entity organizations with genuinely complex ownership, the kind of structures common in real estate, data centers, and solar infrastructure. The pitch to controllers is a shorter, cleaner close; the pitch to CFOs is the confidence to sign off knowing exactly how the numbers came together.

More interesting than the product is the problem list. Netgain names four failure points its software is designed to handle:

• A single locked-in reporting hierarchy. The business needs to see results by entity, by region, by property, or by fund — but the system allows one rollup, so every alternate view is a manual rebuild.
• Systems built for full ownership. When every entity is assumed 100 percent owned, there is no clean way to handle partial investments and non-controlling interests.
• Murky currency translation. Results rolling up across multiple currencies produce translation adjustments nobody can tie back to source rates.
• Reporting that cannot tie it together. The consolidation produces a number the team has to take on faith instead of a visible path from each figure back to where it came from.

That fourth point is the design center: transparency, showing where every consolidated balance comes from and how it was built, at what the company describes as a fraction of the cost of the specialized consolidation tools that have long been the only alternative. The quotes from Netgain's founders say the same thing in plainer language — consolidation has been hard and expensive for too long, and accountants should spend less time reconciling and more time on judgment.

Read that list again, because it doubles as a self-test. If three of those four bullets describe your close, your problem is not effort. It is architecture.

Five signs your books have outgrown spreadsheets​

You do not need a vendor to tell you the close is broken; the symptoms are measurable. Here are the five that matter, roughly in the order they appear.

1. The close takes weeks, not days. A well-run close for a growing company lands in five to eight business days. When consolidation is the bottleneck, the numbers balloon: nearly half of CFOs without automated consolidation need 21 or more days to close their books, according to Consero Global's 2024 benchmarking. If your October numbers arrive when November is half over, nobody is managing the business from them — they are reading history.

2. Spreadsheet workarounds keep multiplying outside the system. One consolidation workbook becomes three, plus the FX schedule, plus the intercompany tracker, plus the version your predecessor built that nobody dares to delete. Each new workaround is a vote of no confidence in the system, and each one is maintained by exactly one person. When that person is on vacation, the close stops.

3. Intercompany balances never agree on the first pass. The parent's receivable from the subsidiary should equal the subsidiary's payable to the parent, to the dollar, every month. When it does not — different dates, different amounts, one side booked and the other side forgotten — the difference lands in a plug or a suspense account, and the consolidated statements quietly carry a balance the group owes to itself.

4. Currency translation is a black box. Multi-currency consolidation means translating each entity at the right rate — current rates for balance-sheet items, average rates for income-statement activity, historical rates for equity — and booking the difference as a translation adjustment. Done in a spreadsheet, the rates get pasted, the formulas get extended by hand, and the adjustment becomes a number nobody can reconstruct. Manual multi-currency processes are a top-three close delay driver for most mid-market finance teams.

5. You cannot answer "which entity made money" without a project. The consolidated total exists, but slicing it — by entity, by location, by line of business — means rebuilding the rollup by hand. That is the single-hierarchy trap: the system produces one view, and every question leadership actually asks requires a side quest.

Two broader statistics put a number on the drag. In LiveFlow's 2026 survey of finance teams, 78 percent still export data to spreadsheets to get the close done, and 75 percent spend part of every close simply waiting on data. The bottleneck is rarely accounting knowledge. It is plumbing.

What consolidation actually requires (no matter which tool you use)​

Software can automate consolidation, but it cannot define it. Four mechanics have to be right, in a spreadsheet or anywhere else, so fix your understanding of them before you evaluate any product.

Intercompany eliminations. Under both US GAAP (ASC 810) and IFRS 10, the consolidated group is treated as a single economic entity. A sale from your Subsidiary A to your Subsidiary B is not a sale to the outside world, so it must disappear: the revenue on one side and the expense on the other are eliminated, along with any receivable and payable between the two. Skip this and consolidated revenue is overstated — you counted the same dollar twice, once when it moved and once when it left the group.

In a plain-text ledger, the elimination is just two balanced entries that unwind the internal activity:

2026-10-31 * "Eliminate October intercompany management fee"
  Income:Intercompany:Management-Fees     5000.00 USD
  Expenses:Intercompany:Management-Fees  -5000.00 USD
 
2026-10-31 * "Eliminate intercompany loan balance"
  Liabilities:Intercompany:Loan-From-Parent   25000.00 USD
  Assets:Intercompany:Loan-To-Subsidiary     -25000.00 USD

The first entry debits the parent's fee income and credits the subsidiary's fee expense, removing both from the consolidated result. The second unwinds the loan the parent shows as an asset and the subsidiary shows as a liability. Neither entry touches cash or outside parties, which is exactly the point: the group cannot owe money to itself. When your elimination entries are explicit transactions like these instead of spreadsheet adjustments, the tie-out is automatic — the consolidated balance is the sum of the postings, and every posting names its reason.

Non-controlling interests. The moment you own 80 percent of an entity instead of 100, full consolidation still applies — you bring in 100 percent of the subsidiary's assets, liabilities, revenue, and expenses — but the 20 percent owned by outsiders has to appear as a non-controlling interest in equity and in net income. Systems (and spreadsheet templates) built on the assumption of full ownership have nowhere to put this, so partial ownership gets fudged with side calculations. If your structure includes minority investors, joint ventures, or a fund with outside LPs, confirm that any tool you evaluate models NCI natively rather than as an afterthought.

Currency translation with visible rates. Each foreign entity keeps its books in its functional currency, and consolidation translates them into the reporting currency. The mechanics are standard — current rate for assets and liabilities, average rate for income and expenses, historical rates for equity transactions — but the control that matters is traceability: every translated balance should point back to the rate and rate type used. "The spreadsheet says so" is not a control. Ask any prospective tool to show you the rate behind a translated number, and walk away if it cannot.

One chart of accounts, enforced. Consolidation adds accounts together across entities, which only works if the accounts mean the same thing everywhere. When Subsidiary A books software subscriptions to Office Expense and Subsidiary B books them to IT Services, the consolidated line items are fiction. Standardize the chart of accounts across entities — same numbers, same definitions, same mapping for local variations — before you automate anything. Automation applied to inconsistent charts produces wrong answers faster.

Fix the process before you buy the product​

A consolidation tool purchased on top of a messy process becomes a faster mess. Four fixes cost nothing and determine whether any software succeeds:

1. Reconcile intercompany monthly, not at year-end. Put every intercompany balance on a monthly matching schedule: each entity lists what it owes and is owed by each counterparty, differences are investigated in the month they arise, and nothing rolls forward unexplained. Most intercompany differences are timing or data-entry errors that take minutes to fix in the current month and hours to forensically reconstruct six months later.

2. Give every entity the same close calendar. Consolidation cannot start until the last entity closes, so one late entity delays the group. Set a single cutoff, a single submission deadline, and a named owner per entity. The 75 percent of teams waiting on data are mostly waiting on a process, not a person.

3. Document the ownership map. Draw the group structure — every entity, every ownership percentage, every change during the period — and keep it current. Acquisitions mid-year, partial disposals, and new entities each change what consolidates and how. If the map lives in someone's head, the consolidation inherits every gap in their memory.

4. Keep the support behind every consolidated balance. Each consolidated number should trace to entity trial balances plus a visible list of eliminations, NCI allocations, and translation adjustments. This is the transparency Netgain is selling, but it is also just good practice: an auditor, a buyer, or a new controller should be able to walk any balance back to its sources without asking you what a formula means.

Do these four things and two good outcomes follow. Either the close gets fast enough that the spreadsheet survives another year — a legitimate result — or you walk into a product evaluation knowing exactly which pain each feature must kill.

If you evaluate a tool — or join a beta​

Netgain's founding cohort is one option among many, and beta programs deserve a clear-eyed look. The upside is real: you shape the product around your actual structure, usually at favorable pricing, with direct access to the product team. The price is also real: beta software has rough edges, your team does the testing, and a vendor that pivots can strand your process. Never join a beta as your only consolidation path — run it alongside the existing close until it earns the job.

Whichever vendor you talk to, ask the questions the failure list implies:

• Show me the same month-end in two different hierarchies — by entity and by business line — without rebuilding anything.
• Show me a partially owned subsidiary flowing through to non-controlling interest, and the audit trail behind it.
• Show me a translated balance and the exact rate behind it.
• Show me the full path from one consolidated number back to every source posting.

If the demo cannot do those four things live, on something resembling your structure, the product solves a simpler company than yours.

The last useful step​

Consolidation software is having a moment because the pain finally got loud enough for vendors to hear. But the product announcement is not the news that matters to you — the checklist inside it is. This week, time your close by stage and find where the days actually go; reconcile every intercompany balance to zero or a named, dated explanation; and write down your group structure with ownership percentages. Those three artifacts — a timed close, clean intercompany, a current map — are what make the next close faster whether you buy anything or not. The spreadsheet was never the system. You were. Make what you know visible enough that the numbers stop depending on your memory, and the tool decision gets easy.