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Twenty companies, one reporting layer.
A private equity group with 20+ portfolio companies on disconnected ERPs and no single source of truth.
- Client
- A private equity group
- Sector
- Private equity, portfolio operations
Growth goal
Give a private equity group one reporting layer across more than twenty portfolio companies.
Operating constraint
Every company ran a different ERP and format. Monthly consolidation was slow and entirely manual.
Measured result
Board-ready reports in minutes. Cash-flow risks caught three weeks earlier.
The full story
- Baseline
- More than twenty ERPs and formats, and a monthly consolidation that took the team days.
- System
- Automated pipelines into one central warehouse, with AI anomaly detection watching every figure.
- Controls
- Anomalies are flagged for a person, never corrected silently. Every number traces back to its source system.
- Result
- Board-ready reports in minutes, cash-flow risks surfaced three weeks earlier, and a group that can add a company without adding a process.
In depth
A group that had outgrown manual consolidation
A private equity group was growing its portfolio. More than twenty companies, each with its own ERP, chart of accounts and reporting habits, now sat under one roof. The partners wanted one clear picture of trading, cash and covenant headroom across the group. They needed to see stress in a company before it showed up in the board pack. The ambition was clear. The operating reality was a month-end process that took days of copying, fixing and aligning spreadsheets from every finance team. The group’s ability to add new companies was hitting a limit.
The central finance team had become the bottleneck. Each month they chased files, translated account codes and reworked templates so that the board could see a consolidated view. Every exception slowed them down. Late submissions, new local reports, one-off adjustments and different period treatments were all handled by hand. The group carried concentration and liquidity risk without a live view of cash movements. The work was careful and skilled, but it did not scale with the pipeline of new deals. The partners knew they could not keep adding bodies to the close.
Where the consolidation process hit its limit
The constraint sat in the middle of the reporting chain. Each portfolio company produced trial balances and management packs in its own format. The group team pulled them into a spreadsheet model that tried to be the common language. Every new company meant another mapping tab and another layer of complexity. The mechanics of the close became opaque, tied to people who knew how each sheet worked and how to handle each company’s quirks. Any change in reporting requirements meant a rework of the entire model before the month-end clock ran out.
The risk was not only delay. With manual data handling, it was hard to know whether every figure on the consolidated pack could be traced back cleanly. Late corrections and last-minute adjustments crept in. The team had to choose between speed and depth of review. Cash positions were reported after the fact, which meant cash-flow issues were often spotted in arrears rather than ahead of time. The group could not rely on a single view of the numbers to drive conversations with lenders, boards and portfolio leadership. The opportunity in front of them demanded a different operating base.
A connected warehouse and reporting layer
SIEL worked with the group to build a reporting layer that sat across all portfolio companies without forcing them onto a single ERP. The first step was to connect the source systems. Automated pipelines pulled the required ledgers, balances and supporting data from more than twenty ERPs into one central warehouse. The mapping logic that had lived in spreadsheets moved into code, with a clear and maintainable chart alignment. The consolidation rules became part of the system rather than something recreated by hand at every close.
Once the data flowed into the warehouse, SIEL and the finance team defined the views that mattered to the group: consolidated P&L, balance sheet and cash-flow, along with company level cuts that matched how partners and operating teams talked about performance. Reporting tools sat on top of the warehouse so that the group could generate board-ready packs directly. When a new company joined the portfolio, the work shifted from reworking every template to adding and testing one new pipeline and mapping layer. The operation could now absorb growth without amplifying complexity for the central team.
AI catching problems while people stay in control
The group’s concern was not only speed. They wanted confidence that unusual movements would be picked up without needing a person to scan every line in every report. SIEL added AI-based anomaly detection to the warehouse layer. The system watched figures across companies and time, and highlighted entries or movements that did not fit expected patterns. Instead of relying on manual checks, the finance team saw focused alerts that directed them to where a review was needed before reports went to the board.
Control stayed with the people who owned the numbers. Anomalies were flagged to the relevant users for investigation. They were never corrected silently by the system. Every figure in the consolidated view could be traced back through the warehouse to the source ERP and underlying transactions. This audit trail meant that when a partner or CFO asked about a number, the team could walk back through the logic and data rather than guessing at where a discrepancy had entered a spreadsheet. The operation gained both speed and a higher standard of oversight on the same platform.
A reporting base that grows with the portfolio
With the new system in place, the group’s reporting rhythm changed. Board-ready reports that had required days of manual consolidation could now be produced in minutes from the warehouse views. Cash-flow risks that previously emerged late in the cycle were surfaced around three weeks earlier. That gave the group and portfolio CFOs time to act, adjust plans and engage with lenders before an issue became urgent. The monthly close turned into a review process, not a data assembly exercise.
The structural gain was capacity. The group could add new portfolio companies without redesigning its reporting process or adding another layer of manual work. Each new ERP connection became a known piece of engineering and mapping, not a fresh spreadsheet build. For a company in a similar position, this kind of reporting layer creates room for growth. The central team moves from chasing files and fixing formats to analysing performance, managing risk and supporting investment decisions, with a system that reflects how the portfolio actually operates.
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