Most Australian tech companies don't set out to become multi-entity groups. It happens incrementally. You incorporate a US Delaware entity to take American customers and equity investment. You spin up a Singapore entity to anchor APAC operations. You acquire a smaller competitor and inherit their NZ subsidiary. Three years in, you're a group — and your finance function is held together by a Google Sheets workbook nobody wants to touch.
The pain is rarely about the first entity. It's about the second one. The moment you have two legal entities transacting with each other, you're suddenly responsible for intercompany eliminations, multi-currency consolidation, transfer pricing documentation, and group-level reporting that ties back to AASB or US GAAP — depending on who's asking.
For finance teams running on QuickBooks, Xero, or even mid-market ERPs like Sage Intacct or NetSuite, the standard answer has been the same for two decades: export each entity's trial balance to Excel, build a consolidation workbook with FX columns, manually post elimination journals, hope nothing breaks, and lose a week every month to the exercise.
There is now a better answer.
When ERP vendors say they "support multi-entity," they mean very different things. It's worth being precise.
Multi-entity at the data layer means each entity has its own chart of accounts, its own ledger, its own period locks, and its own audit trail — but the system natively understands that those entities belong to a group. You don't log into separate instances. You don't export and re-import. The consolidated view is computed live from underlying entity data, not stitched together at month-end.
Multi-currency at the data layer means every transaction stores its original transaction currency, the entity's functional currency, and the group's reporting currency — with FX rates applied at the appropriate points (transaction date, period-end, historical for equity). It means CTA (currency translation adjustment) is calculated automatically, not bolted on through a custom report.
Native intercompany means when Entity A invoices Entity B, the system creates the matching entries in both ledgers and flags the pair for elimination at the group level. The eliminations run automatically as part of the consolidation, not as a manual exercise the controller does in a separate workbook.
Campfire.ai is one of the few modern ERPs that does all three at the data layer. It supports real-time consolidation across multiple entities and currencies, automatic intercompany eliminations, and granular permissioning — Campfire publishes a figure of 1,200+ permission types — so different controllers can own different entities without seeing each other's data.
TwelveLabs is a useful reference. They're a multimodal AI company headquartered in the US, with operations in Korea — two functional currencies, two regulatory regimes, intercompany flows running in both directions. Before Campfire, their three-person finance team was running global operations on QuickBooks, which doesn't natively support multi-entity reporting at all. Bank reconciliations took days. Month-end close stretched into weeks. Brian Lese, their Head of Finance, summed up the result: "Campfire has been a major unlock in terms of efficiency. We're able to close our books in half the time without adding headcount."
Delphia, an investment platform that migrated from Sage Intacct to Campfire, faced a different problem. Sage Intacct does support multi-entity — but their VP of Finance Andrea Burton noted that even with a mid-market ERP, the close process was slower than the business needed. Her summary, after migrating: Campfire is "the only solution in the market that is modern, yet has the power to support our global operations across multiple legal entities and currencies."
These are Campfire's published case studies, and the outcomes cited are theirs. We reference them because they reflect a real shift in what's possible — but every group's complexity is different, and your results depend on how messy your historical data is, how clean your current chart of accounts is, and how well your intercompany flows are documented.
In our experience, the technology isn't usually the failure point. The failure points are upstream.
Charts of accounts that don't reconcile across entities. If your AU entity uses one COA structure and your US sub uses another, consolidation requires mapping — and most groups have never formally documented that mapping. We rebuild the COA before configuring Campfire, not after.
Intercompany history that was never properly recorded. If three years of intercompany loans, management fees, and shared service charges were posted inconsistently, the opening balance sheet at cutover won't reconcile. This is the single most common cause of post-migration audit findings.
FX treatment that wasn't right to begin with. Many ANZ groups translate their US sub's results using a single month-end rate for everything — P&L, balance sheet, equity. That's not AASB-compliant, and a serious auditor will flag it. Migrating to a system that handles FX correctly exposes the problem; it doesn't create it. We surface this during planning, not at the audit.
No clear group reporting structure. "Should we report at the parent or at the group level?" sounds like a basic question, but it determines how the entity hierarchy gets configured in the new system. Getting it wrong means rework.
These aren't reasons to avoid moving to a modern ERP. They're reasons to engage someone who has done it before.
Campfire's product handles the technical heavy lifting — the live consolidation, the automatic eliminations, the multi-currency math. What it can't do is your migration plan, your COA rationalisation, your intercompany clean-up, or your AASB/IFRS mapping for ANZ-headquartered groups.
That's the work we do.
A typical Cynder-led multi-entity Campfire implementation includes a structured discovery of your entity hierarchy and intercompany flows; rebuilding or rationalising your chart of accounts so it works for both group and entity-level reporting; cleaning historical intercompany balances so opening positions reconcile; configuring FX policies and CTA treatment to match your audit expectations; and training your team to own the consolidation process going forward — not to depend on us indefinitely.
Most engagements complete in 4-6 weeks for groups of 2–5 entities, with the first consolidated month-end run on Campfire in the cutover month.
If your finance team is still building monthly consolidation in Excel — exporting trial balances, applying FX manually, posting elimination journals by hand, and praying the totals tie — you already know what it costs. Not just hours, but the credibility of the numbers themselves.
We'd welcome a conversation about whether your group is a fit for Campfire, and what a Cynder-led implementation would look like.