Is there an *quick* way to consolidate multiple years of Quickbooks P&Ls?

I'm a first-year analyst in a downstream energy/convenience retail coverage group. Many of our clients are medium-sized (50 - 500 site) gas station chains throughout the country. Every gas station has its own P&L, and we consolidate them into a "master" P&L for every deal.

The problem is that many of the clients use Quickbooks, and the line items above each subtotal are often different. Consolidating 500 P&Ls can take upwards of two work days, even for the more experienced analysts/associates. Is there a faster way to do this? Many thanks!

3 Comments
 

There must be a way.

Maybe build an equivalency table if the row names are the same across the different P&Ls and XLOOKUP / INDEX MATCH it.

Riskier could be to use the SEARCH / FIND function if there is a specific word you are looking for.

Another way, providing that some P&L are identical in presentation is to group them and have checks to find out which presentation category a P&L belongs to and have toggles to pull the right figures.

 
Most Helpful

If the line items are different it’s going to be very difficult. A bit hard to fully understand your problem, but assuming one company has something like “wages” and another company has a line that is called “payroll” there’s going to be no way to consolidate them all without manually classifying which buckets should go together. 
 

Way I would handle this problem is creating an index of all line items and doing an index match or sumif based on the index. Because the line items are going to have variance in the names, really don’t think there is anyway to consolidate them all. In theory you could have some ai tool likely do the bucketing for you, but you would still need to check it.

 

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