CONSOLIDATION SYSTEMS IN CORPORATE ENTITI ES

Legal regulations on the national and European level require consolida ted annual accounts from corporate entities. The making and coordinati on of several or many individual accounts and bringing them together i n one corporate account demand considerable personal, time and financi al resources and heavily relies on electronic data processing systems. From a technical perspective the commercially available software prog rams can be divided into three categories. Standard software packages, used for consolidation purposes, evaluative accounting programs with a complementary consolidation module and universal standard software i n the form of integrated user applications on PCs and workstations. Th e following essay deals with the structure and functions of these prog rams, and discusses a proposed solution for a practical example.