Global Financial
Consolidation

A global manufacturing conglomerate operating across 12 business units in 4 continents engaged Garnet Grid to solve a critical visibility problem: their executive leadership lacked a single source of truth for financial performance.

Each division maintained its own reporting stack — a patchwork of Excel workbooks, on-premise SSRS reports, and legacy Crystal Reports. Monthly close required manually exporting and reconciling data from 7 different ERP instances, 3 separate chart-of-account structures, and 4 different currencies.

The existing process consumed the FP&A team's first four working days every month, delaying strategic decision-making and introducing reconciliation errors that averaged $340K in quarterly adjustments.

The CFO's team coined a term for the first week of every month: "the blackout." No real-time data, no KPI visibility, just spreadsheet reconciliation across time zones.

We designed a three-tier Power BI architecture that centralized all financial data into a single semantic model while preserving each division's autonomy and data ownership.

The core challenge was computing intercompany eliminations and currency-adjusted P&L aggregations across 12 business units without sacrificing query performance. We developed a set of reusable DAX measure patterns that handle multi-currency consolidation at the calculation layer.

We also implemented a star-schema with 14 conformed dimensions, including a custom fiscal calendar dimension that handles 3 different fiscal year-end dates across the group. The model's partition strategy uses incremental refresh with a 2-year rolling window — only the current quarter refreshes nightly, while historical partitions remain cached.

The transformation was deployed in a phased rollout over 10 weeks. By Month 2, the CFO was running ad-hoc profitability analyses that previously required a week of analyst preparation.