Re: Intercompany reconciliation
Gloria,
At one company I worked for, we had 9 operating companies (12 total). We were able to create eliminations fairly easily by lining up the intercompany accounts to match in any pair of companies.
For example, the account in the US company for the US - Canada relationship would be, say, 14500, and the same account would be used in the Canadian account for that relationship. Accordingly, there should be a corresponding entry on either side of the relationship whenever intercompany is invoked; any difference must be due to either a GL entry to the intercompany account, or a real FX difference.
To check against the GL entry issue, just print a detailed gl listing for the intercompany account for both companies, ensuring that no entries were sourced from the GL. If there are none, then you have an FX issue, which is solved by a simple FX entry. The accounts will eliminate on consolidation.
One other important note: when we got to around 7 companies, we finally stopped supporting sub-to-sub transactions; that is, a transaction where a subsidiary sold something to another subsidiary was required to go through the parent companies; this ensured a much simpler setup for the intercompany, and also was inline with the legal relationships of the companies. I imagine, if you have 5 companies that can all sell to each other, you're going to have a plate of spaghetti pretty soon...