The Intercompany dimension, the matching backbone
Eliminations can only remove what they can see, and this dimension is how they see: who traded with whom, on every posting. Intercompany is the documented top driver of late close nights, and the fix is a tagging discipline, not a smarter rule.
Every cell in a consolidation cube answers several questions at once, and each dimension carries one of them. This page is the question of who sat on the other side of a number. How the elimination then posts lives on the Consolidation page, and the whole reference is mapped on the FCCS index.
◆ How the dimension works— the hierarchy, the tags, and the three coordinates every elimination decomposes to.
| Piece | What it does |
|---|---|
| The partner hierarchy | Under the intercompany top member sits one member per trading partner, mirroring the entity dimension, plus FCCS_No Intercompany for every line that has no partner at all. A posting therefore carries three coordinates, entity, account, and partner, and that trio decomposes any elimination back to the transactions behind it. |
| The account tags | Accounts opt in: intercompany accounts carry the IC_Acc_Yes attribute, and the ones that receive the balancing side carry Plug_Acc_Yes as well. The consolidation's intercompany rules only look at tagged accounts, which is why the untagged one overstates the group in silence. |
| Where the results land | Elimination entries post inside the Elimination member of the consolidation belt, with their detail visible in the intercompany eliminations branch of the data source dimension. Matched receivable and payable pairs net to zero at the first common parent; whatever does not match sits in the plug. |
◆ The matching discipline— the field playbook for the close-week problem, from the practitioners who live it.
| Habit | Why it works |
|---|---|
| Match early, match often | Out-of-balance pairs surface by account and currency days before the close, while the counterparty can still fix the source. Matching run only at close turns the last week into archaeology. |
| Thresholds agreed in advance | A variance tolerance and a cutoff time per pair, decided before the close, converts arguments into a checklist and makes chronic offenders visible month over month. |
| Watch the plug | The plug account is the unmatched remainder made visible. A plug that grows is the earliest signal that tagging or timing broke somewhere upstream. |
| Know the one that never matches | Currency differences on intercompany pairs booked at different rates need tracking, and gains and losses on an intercompany loan in a third currency stay in the income statement even when the loan itself eliminates. Accounting, not a bug, the full case lives on known issues. |
In the owned warehouse, the star schema we recommend building beside FCCS on your own cloud, mapped here, the partner lands as its own dimension on the consolidated fact, and matching becomes a query: receivables against payables, pivoted by entity pair, any morning, not just close week. Tags, member behavior, and elimination mechanics verified against Oracle's documentation and practitioner references, July 2026.
- partner
- The other entity in the trade. The dimension's whole reason to exist.
- IC_Acc_Yes
- The tag that opts an account into elimination. Absent, the account never eliminates.
- Plug_Acc_Yes
- The tag on the account that receives an elimination's balancing side.
- FCCS_No Intercompany
- Where every partnerless line lives. Most of the cube, by volume.
- the audit trio
- Entity, account, partner. Enough to decompose any elimination.