Frequently Asked Questions.

We help finance teams at mid-to-large companies implement and run Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solutions. That covers financial consolidation, planning and forecasting, disclosure management, account reconciliation, lease accounting (IFRS 16), Pillar 2 global minimum tax, and sustainability reporting. We design, implement, and support these solutions on three leading platforms: OneStream, Oracle EPM, and Tagetik.

Our typical clients are Norwegian and Nordic companies with complex group structures — multiple entities, multiple currencies, cross-border operations. The people we work with day to day are usually Group Accounting Managers, Heads of Finance, CFOs, Business Controllers, and FP&A leads. Company size ranges from mid-market groups outgrowing Excel to large listed companies modernising legacy systems.

Because no single platform is best at everything. OneStream, Oracle EPM, and Tagetik are all Gartner top-tier EPM platforms, but they have different strengths. We recommend the one that fits your specific situation — your size, complexity, existing systems, and which processes you need to support. Being multi-vendor means we advise based on fit, not based on which vendor we happen to sell.

Yes. We’re based in Norway, we speak Norwegian, and we understand Norwegian regulatory requirements and reporting practices. That matters to Group Accounting Managers who want to work in their own language and with consultants who understand local legislation. We also work across the Nordics and with international clients.

We’re a focused team of senior consultants with deep experience in EPM — both functionally (accounting, finance, reporting) and technically (platform design and implementation). We’re growing and actively recruiting people who combine finance knowledge with an interest in technology.

Three things. We combine accounting expertise with technical implementation — we understand the standard, not just the software. We work across three top-tier platforms, so our advice is vendor-neutral. And we’re building long-term relationships, not just delivering projects — our managed services offering means we stay with clients after go-live.

It starts with a scoping phase where we understand your requirements, map your group structure, and design the solution. Then we configure the platform, connect to your source systems, build reports and dashboards, test with your team, and go live — typically with hands-on support during the first close cycle. After that, we offer managed services for ongoing support and enhancements.

It depends on the service and varies by scope. We scope every project individually based on your need and complexity — and your capacity to contribute.. 

Both. Most of our work is done remotely, but we come to you for workshops, design sessions, and key milestones. For meetings and initial conversations, we’re happy to come to your office or meet digitally — whatever works best. Typically 30 to 45 minutes for a first conversation.

It depends on the scope of the project. We work on a project basis for implementations and offer retainer, time & material, and interim models for ongoing support. We’re transparent about pricing and will give you a clear scope and cost estimate before any project starts. The first conversation is always free and without commitment.

That’s up to you. Some clients are fully self-sufficient after implementation. Most choose some form of ongoing support — whether that’s a retainer for close cycle help and enhancements, or ad-hoc support when something comes up. We’re building our managed services offering specifically so that clients don’t feel abandoned after the project ends.

OneStream, Oracle EPM, and Tagetik. All three are Gartner top-tier EPM platforms with strong track records in consolidation, planning, and compliance. We’re certified partners for all three and recommend based on fit, not preference.

Based on your specific situation — group complexity, number of entities, which processes you need to support, what systems you already run, and what your team is comfortable with. Each platform has strengths. We’ll explain the trade-offs honestly and recommend the one that fits best. Sometimes the answer is “keep what you have and extend it.”

You own it. The subscription sits between you and the vendor (OneStream, Oracle, or Tagetik). We’re the implementation and support partner. That means if you ever want to switch partners, your platform and your data stay with you.

Yes. All three platforms are designed to pull data from ERPs — SAP, Dynamics, Oracle, Xledger, Visma, Unit4 and others. The integration is a standard part of every implementation. We set up the data connections so trial balance and transaction data flows automatically from your source systems into the EPM platform.

Seven core services: Financial Consolidation & Close, Planning, Forecasting & Scenario Modelling, Disclosure Management, Account Reconciliation, IFRS 16 Lease Accounting, Pillar 2 Global Minimum Tax, and Sustainability Reporting. We also offer Managed Services & Support for ongoing help after implementation.

No. Many clients come to us with a problem — “our close takes too long,” “we can’t answer the board’s what-if questions,” “our auditor wants better documentation” — and we help them figure out which service solves it. You can also start with a general conversation and we’ll guide you.

It usually starts with one. Financial consolidation is the most common starting point because it’s a regulatory requirement. From there, clients often add disclosure management (to publish the reports), then planning (to look forward), and other services as needs arise. But some clients start with account reconciliation as a quick win, and others come to us specifically for IFRS 16 or Pillar 2 compliance.

Consolidation first is the most common path — it’s where the regulatory pressure is. Disclosure management pairs naturally with consolidation (most clients implement them together). Planning is the typical next step once you trust your actuals. Account reconciliation can start independently and is often a foot-in-the-door project. IFRS 16, Pillar 2, and Sustainability are compliance-driven and can be added whenever the requirement hits.

Yes. We support OneStream, Oracle EPM, and Tagetik regardless of who built it. We start with an assessment of your current setup, learn your configuration, and provide the same quality of support as if we had implemented it ourselves.

Financial consolidation is the process of combining the financial results of all entities in a group into a single set of consolidated financial statements. It involves collecting trial balance data from each entity, translating currencies, eliminating intercompany transactions, handling ownership structures and minority interests, and producing consolidated P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. It’s required for any group that reports to shareholders, regulators, or auditors.

ERPs are transactional systems — they’re designed to record what has happened within a single entity. Consolidation requires a different architecture: multi-entity data collection, currency translation, intercompany elimination, ownership calculations, and group-level adjustments. We’ve seen clients try to build consolidation in Dynamics 365 or SAP and spend months before realising it wasn’t the right tool. If your group structure is simple and you own 100% of everything, aggregation in the ERP might work. Once you have partial ownership, multiple currencies, and complex intercompany flows, you need a dedicated platform.

Typically 3 to 6 months, depending on the number of entities, the complexity of your group structure, and the scope of reporting. Simple groups with a clean chart of accounts can go faster. Groups with complex ownership, multiple ERP sources, and extensive reporting requirements take longer. We scope every project individually.

More common than you’d think. Even large companies sometimes run their consolidation in Excel for years. It works until it doesn’t — the triggers are usually growing complexity, audit pressure, errors discovered during reconciliation, or preparing for a stock listing. We’ve helped several clients make that transition, and the most common reaction is surprise at how many errors existed in their old Excel models.

Disclosure management is the process of producing your published financial reports — quarterly statements, annual reports, board packs, and regulatory filings — from your consolidated financial data. Instead of manually assembling reports in Word, a disclosure management platform connects directly to your consolidation data, so figures update automatically. Teams collaborate on commentary, version control is built in, and you can publish in PDF, Word, XBRL, or Excel from a single source.

It works best when connected to your consolidation, but it’s not a strict prerequisite. The real value comes from the live data connection — when a number changes in consolidation, every affected figure in the report updates automatically. Most of our clients implement disclosure management alongside or immediately after consolidation.

Word is a document tool, not a reporting platform. When you build a quarterly report in Word, every number is manually typed or pasted. If a figure changes late in the process, someone has to find and update every instance. There’s no audit trail, no version control beyond filenames, and no way to know if the numbers in the report match what’s in the system. A disclosure management platform solves all of that.

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a standardised electronic format for financial reporting. Regulators in many jurisdictions require listed companies to file their annual reports in XBRL (also called iXBRL or inline XBRL). The platform handles the tagging and formatting — your team produces the report, and the system generates the XBRL output alongside the PDF and Word versions.

2 to 4 months as a standalone project. If you’re adding it to an existing consolidation platform, it’s often faster because the data connection is already in place. The scope depends on how many report types you need to produce and how complex your disclosure requirements are.

Instead of building a budget line by line in a spreadsheet, driver-based planning links your financial outcomes to the business variables that actually determine them — headcount, pricing, volume, exchange rates, capacity utilisation, and so on. Change a driver and the financial impact cascades through the entire model: P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow. It makes your plan a living model of your business, not a static table of numbers.

Excel is flexible but fragile. As your business grows — more entities, more departments, more scenarios — spreadsheet-based planning becomes increasingly slow, error-prone, and hard to maintain. A dedicated planning platform gives you version control, workflow management, automated data collection, scenario comparison, and integration with your actuals. The model logic is centralised and controlled, not scattered across files on someone’s laptop.

No, but it helps significantly. If you’re already consolidating on one of our platforms, your entity structure, chart of accounts, and data integrations are in place. Adding planning is an extension, not a new build. If you don’t have consolidation yet, we can still implement planning — but you’ll get the most value when your actuals and forecasts live on the same platform.

Yes, and many of our clients are doing exactly that. The platform supports both — you can run your annual budget process alongside rolling forecasts, or transition fully to rolling forecasts over time. We help you design the cadence that fits your organisation.

That’s what connected planning means. Sales teams can input pipeline assumptions. HR can plan headcount and compensation. Operations can model capacity and production costs. Each contributor works in a structured input form, and their data feeds into the central financial model. Finance stays in control of the model logic while the business owns its own assumptions.

The same reason you can’t consolidate in your ERP — it’s a transactional system, not a planning engine. Scenario comparison, driver-based logic, rolling forecasts, and multi-dimensional what-if analysis require a different architecture. We’ve seen clients try to build planning in Dynamics 365 or SAP and spend months before realising it wasn’t the right tool for the job.

No — and that’s exactly why many companies delay it. Consolidation is required by auditors and regulators, so it gets prioritised. Planning is “nice to have” until the board starts asking questions you can’t answer quickly, or until a market shift catches you off guard. The companies that invest in planning do it because they want to make better decisions faster — not because someone is making them.

Account reconciliation is the process of comparing and matching account balances and transactions across systems, ledgers, and source documents to make sure your financial data is accurate and complete. It involves identifying differences between subsidiary ledgers and the general ledger, investigating discrepancies, and recording any adjusting entries. Everyone does it — the question is whether you do it in spreadsheets or in a controlled system with automation, certification, and audit trails.

The reconciliation logic is largely the same — you’re still comparing balances and investigating differences. What changes is the automation, the controls, and the evidence. Automated matching handles routine transactions. Certification workflows ensure every account is formally signed off. Close task management shows you where you are. And the audit trail documents everything without you having to build it manually.

No — and that’s one of the reasons this is often the first service clients implement with us. Account reconciliation can run independently on the platform. It connects to your ERP trial balance directly. If you later add consolidation, the two work together seamlessly because they’re on the same system.

This is one of our fastest implementations. Typical projects take 4 to 8 weeks depending on the number of entities and accounts in scope. It’s a low-effort project for both us and your finance team.

Typically you start with balance sheet accounts — cash, receivables, payables, intercompany, accruals, and any high-risk or high-volume accounts. The platform supports a risk-based approach where you define which accounts need full reconciliation and which need lighter-touch certification. We help you design the scope based on materiality and audit requirements.

Not strictly in the way consolidation is. But auditors increasingly expect documented evidence of reconciliation as part of their review. A proper reconciliation platform gives you that evidence automatically and improves your internal control environment.

IFRS 16 is an accounting standard that changed how leases are reported. Before, most operating leases didn’t appear on the balance sheet. Now they do. Your company must recognise a right-of-use asset and a lease liability for nearly every lease. The result: your balance sheet gets bigger, and you need to calculate depreciation and interest on these items every reporting period.

Any company reporting under IFRS — which includes most listed companies and many private groups in Norway and the EU. Some exemptions exist for short-term leases (under 12 months) and low-value assets, but the standard applies broadly. US companies follow ASC 842, which has similar requirements — and our platforms support both standards.

It works for small portfolios. But as you add contracts, entities, and complexity — modifications, variable payments, different currencies — spreadsheets become fragile and time-consuming. The risk isn’t that the formulas are wrong today. It’s that nobody can verify they’re still right six months from now, especially when someone modifies the file.

The question is how the lease numbers get into your consolidated statements. If your IFRS 16 tool is separate from your consolidation platform, there’s a manual handoff — exporting journal entries, reformatting, importing, reconciling. Running lease accounting on the same platform eliminates that gap.

Yes — and this is one of the areas where a dedicated system really pays for itself. When a lease is modified, the system recalculates from the modification date forward: updated liability, revised depreciation schedule, catch-up adjustments if needed. Doing this correctly in Excel for dozens of contracts is where most teams start to struggle.

A company with 50 contracts and straightforward terms can be live in 6 to 8 weeks. Larger portfolios with multiple entities, complex modifications, and variable payments may take 3 to 4 months. If you’re already on one of our consolidation platforms, the timeline is usually shorter.

Pillar 2 is a set of international tax rules (called GloBE rules) designed to ensure that large multinational groups pay an effective tax rate of at least 15% in every country where they operate. If the effective rate in any jurisdiction falls below 15%, the parent company pays the difference as a “top-up tax.” It applies to groups with consolidated revenue of EUR 750 million or more.

If your group has consolidated revenue of EUR 750 million or above in at least two of the last four fiscal years, and you operate in more than one jurisdiction, you’re likely in scope. Some entities may qualify for safe harbour exclusions, but the scoping exercise itself requires analysis of your group structure and financial data.

The EU directive required implementation for fiscal years beginning on or after 31 December 2023. Norway has adopted the rules. Many jurisdictions are now in their first or second reporting year. The compliance deadline isn’t approaching — it’s here.

They should handle the advisory and interpretation side. But Pillar 2 isn’t a one-off calculation. It’s a recurring process that requires financial data from every entity in your group, adjusted according to specific rules, calculated by jurisdiction, and filed annually. Building that into a repeatable, auditable system is what we do. Your tax advisors bring the expertise on GloBE rule interpretation. We bring the data infrastructure and automation.

Directly. The GloBE calculation starts with your consolidated financial data — entity-level income, taxes paid, intercompany transactions. If your consolidation runs on a platform we support, we can pull that data directly rather than collecting it separately.

Safe harbours are simplified tests that allow you to exclude certain jurisdictions from the full GloBE calculation if you can demonstrate that the effective tax rate is clearly above 15%. They reduce the compliance burden for jurisdictions where top-up tax is obviously not due.

OneStream, Oracle EPM, and Tagetik — the same three platforms we implement. If you’re running one of these, we can support it regardless of who built it.

Yes. We start with an assessment of your current setup — configuration, integrations, customisations, and pain points. Our consultants learn your specific environment before we begin support. It takes a bit longer to onboard than if we’d built it, but the end result is the same quality of service.

Three. A support retainer with a fixed monthly allocation of hours. Time & material for ad-hoc requests with no ongoing commitment. And interim support where a Finarchs consultant is embedded in your team for a defined period — covering parental leave, peak periods, or system transitions.

If the scope is small — adding a new entity, a new report, a new integration — we handle it within managed services. If you’re looking at a full new module (say, adding planning to an existing consolidation platform), we’d scope that as a project alongside your ongoing support.