A guide to financial consolidation and planning modernization — without replacing your ERP
“We keep everyone on a single ERP.” “We’re going to upgrade our ERP and then we’ll perform financial planning and consolidation on it.” “We’re waiting to modernize our financial planning and consolidation until after our ERP upgrade.” These are statements we hear frequently at Anaplan.
Upgrading your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is often warranted (think antiquated ERPs with a lack of API connector capabilities to integrate with your existing datasets and software or to improve security and performance). But swapping ERPs or forcing every subsidiary onto a single ERP is a multi-year program with high cost and real operational disruption.
Acquisitions bring their own ledgers and localizations. Business units cling to specialized workflows that keep the lights on. In order to balance both during an ERP modernization, it requires chart-of-accounts harmonization, calendar alignment, and regulatory nuances that turn “standardize first” into “standstill for a while.” Even if your company has already moved all subsidiaries onto a single ERP, future upgrades/replacements will require significant involvement of all entities using the software.
Meanwhile, your corporate finance team still has to deliver. You need consolidated actuals, forward-looking guidance from financial planning and analysis (FP&A) leaders, and financial reporting produced on a tight cadence.
Maybe the problem isn’t your ERP — it’s the layer around it.
Why ERPs alone can’t deliver agile finance
Pushing every entity onto one ERP won’t fix disconnected planning, inconsistent consolidation rules, or version chaos. And a rip-and-replace introduces new risk right when leadership is asking for faster answers with higher confidence. The smarter move is to keep your systems of record in place, empower your subsidiaries to work with the tools that are best-fit for them and their processes, and instead, modernize the layer that connects them.
ERPs are excellent systems of record — but they’re not designed for the depth and speed required for iterative planning, cross-entity logic, or rapid re-forecasting. That gap creates familiar pain:
- Offline models and manual journals that multiply version risk
- Inconsistent ownership, currency, and intercompany rules across entities
- Long cycles to produce a single, governed view for leadership, slowing down consolidation and critical re-forecasting efforts
The impact is real: slower decisions, higher effort, and less time for analysis.
Extend the life of your ERP, not replace it
You don’t need to standardize on one ERP in order to modernize. Preserve your ledger investments and add a cloud-native, finance-owned solution layer that connects your data, people, and processes. With a governed modeling environment and reusable data pipelines, finance can harmonize structures, run “what-if” analysis, and publish narrative-ready outputs — all while ERPs continue doing what they do best.
How this works with Anaplan
Anaplan adds a finance-owned consolidation, reporting, and planning layer with AI at the core that sits above your existing ERP landscape. This is not another rigid system; it’s a flexible, secure, and powerful environment designed for the complexities of modern finance.
- Connect: Go beyond simple data imports. With Anaplan Data Orchestrator, you can design, automate, and manage secure data flows from any source. Use a no-code interface with pre-built connectors for ERPs (like SAP), GLs, subledgers, HRIS systems, and cloud data lakes to build repeatable data pipelines. This provides complete data lineage, visualizing the entire data flow from source to the planning model, which builds trust and simplifies maintenance. This transparency also significantly reduces audit risk and improves data governance.
- Consolidate: Configure complex financial consolidation logic without writing a single line of code. Business users can define and manage rules for intercompany eliminations, multi-currency translations, and time-based ownership structures using intuitive pick lists and a graphical interface. The system is designed to handle complex requirements like partial ownership, equity pickups, and compliance with multiple accounting standards — such as IFRS and GAAP — simultaneously, ensuring both accuracy and auditability.
- Plan: Leverage Anaplan’s powerful in-memory calculation engine to run multidimensional "what-if" scenario analysis in real time with our Integrated Financial Planning application. Modify key business drivers and instantly see the full impact across your integrated profit and loss (P&L), balance sheet, and cash flow statements. This enables a true continuous planning cycle, allowing FP&A teams to re-forecast in minutes, not days, and provide immediate, data-backed answers to leadership questions about potential market shifts or strategic decisions.
- Report: Produce and distribute financial and narrative reports in a fraction of the time for all stakeholders, from the board to operational managers. All outputs are tied to a single, governed source of data, with role-based access controls ensuring users only see what they are supposed to. Full data traceability and comprehensive audit trails provide the transparency needed for both internal reviews and external audits. For ad-hoc analysis, users can leverage Anaplan XL Reporting to interact with governed Anaplan data directly within Microsoft Excel, empowering teams to answer urgent business questions with speed and confidence, knowing their work is always connected to the live, governed plan.
Link it all with short, reusable integrations and finance-led change control so improvements stick.
Modern financial consolidation and planning that respects your ERP
The pressure on finance teams to deliver more, faster, is relentless. Market dynamics shift, leadership demands immediate insight, and the complexity of managing a global business continues to grow. Relying on a patchwork of legacy systems and offline processes is no longer a viable strategy. It’s a recipe for version risk, slow decision-making, and a finance team bogged down in manual work instead of driving strategic value.
The answer isn't to embark on a risky, multi-year ERP replacement project. The smarter path forward is to modernize the layer around your ERP, creating a connected, agile, and finance-owned environment for financial consolidation, planning, and reporting. With Anaplan, you can preserve your existing ERP investments while empowering your finance team with the tools they need to navigate complexity and drive the business forward. By connecting your data, people, and plans on a unified platform, you can finally move from being reactive to proactive, from manual to automated, and from insight to action.
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