Structure: Five operating companies under one private equity-backed holding company. Industries: Equipment rental, HVAC services, steel manufacturing, medical device manufacturing, and construction. Prior environment: Five separate systems, five charts of accounts, five reporting calendars, none of it standardized. Engagement scope: Standardization onto a single Business Central environment, shared chart of accounts and dimension structure, intercompany processes, consolidated reporting. Timeline: Delivered against a board-committed, single fiscal-year target.
The challenge
The sponsor had built the group through acquisition. Each operating company joined with its own systems and its own way of closing the books. Corporate finance assembled consolidated results by hand every month, reconciling five sets of books that didn’t share a common structure. The sponsor’s mandate was direct: one Business Central environment for the group, with consolidated reporting that didn’t depend on a spreadsheet exercise each close. The corporate team’s working assumption was that no single environment could serve all five without becoming five disconnected configurations that never spoke to each other, which would defeat the point of consolidating in the first place.
The approach
TruNova ran a parallel assessment across all five companies against one target state: one environment, one chart of accounts and dimension framework, intercompany transactions between the companies, and vertical-specific processes handled through configuration rather than five separate implementations. Most of what looked like conflicting requirements were resolved through Business Central’s standard rental, service, manufacturing, and projects modules combined with a shared dimension structure. A small number of gaps, lot and serial compliance tracking for the medical device manufacturer and a specific progress-billing and retainage format for the construction contractor, were scoped as targeted extensions rather than forcing standard functionality where it didn’t reach far enough. Rollout was sequenced by risk, not size: the rental company went live first to validate the shared foundation under real transaction volume, before the higher-complexity companies came onto the same environment.
Results
- All five operating companies live on one Business Central environment on the board-committed timeline.
- A standardized chart of accounts and dimension structure adopted across the group, with intercompany eliminations handled automatically instead of manually.
- Monthly consolidation reduced from a multi-week manual reconciliation to a matter of days.
- Vertical-specific processes (rental billing, service dispatch, production routings, lot traceability, project billing) delivered through configuration, not five disconnected systems.
- Two targeted extensions delivered where standard functionality needed extending, instead of a custom build for every company.
Next step
Tell us what you are trying to fix and we will tell you what the work involves. Estimate my project gives you an initial planning range, or see what this has looked like for other teams.