Bridging accounting systems for a seamless integration
Background
When two Belgian higher education institutions merged, the incorporation of three departments from the smaller school into the larger one required meticulous financial integration.
While the two schools shared a common vision and mutual interests, their accounting and management systems were very different. The larger school operated like a business, with a finance director from the private sector, established processes, an ERP system, financial controls, and a digitized approval system. In contrast, the smaller school was still managed like a non-profit organization, with many paper documents and fewer procedures.
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Complicating matters further, the transfer occurred on September 13, the end of the academic year, rather than at the end of the calendar year or a typical fiscal closing.
Virginie Siriez, Finance consultant from Altesia, was thus appointed to prepare the transfer balance sheet, meaning she had to ready the accounts of the smaller unit for their incorporation into the larger one, as if it were the end of a fiscal year.
Approach
ALIGNING DISPARATE ACCOUNTING SYSTEMS AND DIVIDING SHARED RESOURCES REQUIRED METICULOUS CORRECTIONS, COMPLEX ALLOCATIONS, AND DATABASE RECONCILIATION TO ENSURE A SMOOTH INTEGRATION.
While the finance directors of both schools (one of whom had just retired) believed that the analytical accounting of each department to be transferred would suffice for exporting the accounts to the new entity, the Altesia expert discovered discrepancies. Purchases, for instance, were recorded differently. The analytical accounting had to be corrected and aligned with the new structure. Given the smaller school's limited digitization, the expert often had to search through through binders that predated her birth.
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Additionally, the smaller school had a central department that managed common expenses for its four educational units. The expert had to determine and allocate what would be transferred to the larger school, including buildings, debts, student assets, and cash.
"We didn't expect it to be so complex," explains the expert. "We thought it would be enough to simply divide everything by four. But some buildings, for example, served multiple units.. If we assigned a building to one unit, we had to compensate the others. We sometimes had to create complex Excel formulas because, in the end, everything had to balance, and the balance sheet had to zero out. It was all about finding the right balances."
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Finally, the Social Council, an entity that must be legally distinct from the schools and managing social subsidies and scholarships, had no analytical accounting. Subsidies were allocated extra-accounting to each educational unit based on the number of students assisted. "I started from this situation and had to reallocate and make the accounting coherent. It was primarily a reconciliation task between two databases", Virginie explains.
Results
The transfer balance sheet prepared by Virginie Siriez was audited and approved by the reviewer without any adjustments or corrections.
All legal obligations and deadlines were met.
Virginie created files, procedures, and a user guide to facilitate the work of new arrivals, whether they came from the smaller structure or were newly hired.
Virginie Siriez successfully streamlined the accounting systems of the entities and was able to deliver a transfer balance sheet approved without any correction by the auditor.
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