Intercompany is the job that never gets easier and rarely gets faster: the same recharges every month, balances reconciled by hand, and a clean-up that gets pushed to the end of the quarter or year.
Alex shows the agent working with Translucent's intercompany product on a two-entity group in the UK and US: checking balances, proposing matches for unreconciled transactions, drafting recharge journals and proposing the adjustments that balance the loan accounts.
Key takeaways
- Ask the agent for the intercompany balances across your group. It reads every pair, flags the discrepancies and, in a large group, ranks which need attention first.
- It pulls every unreconciled transaction for the period into an Excel file you can check.
- It proposes matches the date-and-amount rule misses: entries posted on different dates, one-to-many and many-to-many matches, and multi-currency pairs within an FX tolerance.
- You approve each match, and it's recorded in the intercompany product under your name, so there's a clear audit trail.
- Upload a recharge file and it checks each journal balances and that the accounts exist in every entity, then drafts the journals with tax rates and tracking categories, as cash or accrual, draft or approved.
- If a difference remains after matching, it proposes the adjustment to balance the two loan accounts. Nothing posts to Xero until you approve it.
- It can also review the intercompany chart of accounts across the group and create the mappings in the matrix for you, which helps when setting up a new client or tidying up an existing group.
- You don't have to watch it work: start the reconciliation, then start another job while it runs.
Read the transcript
Alex: Hi everyone, and welcome to Fireside number three. Please say hello in the chat and send questions as we go. Oli is answering the technical ones, and we want your questions to steer these sessions, so if you have a particular intercompany challenge, tell us.
Alex: Today is mostly about the intercompany headache. A quick recap first. In June we launched a new AI platform: finance-specific AI agents that extend our existing tools and let accountants, bookkeepers and in-house finance teams hand over more of the manual work they do each month. Think of it as a new finance assistant. You give it instructions and the documents it needs, it gets on with the job, asks when it isn't sure, and gets your review and sign-off before it posts or updates anything. If you've used Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot, you'll know how that back-and-forth works. The agents read your financial data, reason over it and act on your instructions.
Alex: Our first poll asked how you handle intercompany today. Many of you use Translucent, and a good number are still reconciling in spreadsheets, posting manually across the group, or leaving it until the end of the quarter or year.
Alex: Intercompany never gets easier and rarely gets faster. The same recharges every month, ad hoc ones on top, and the bigger the group, usually the more complicated it gets, with more people involved, other offices, outside providers, or for a practice, a client doing it themselves and you doing the clean-up. It creeps into evenings and weekends, and often gets pushed to the year end, when the job becomes weeks rather than days. We've worked with a 34-entity group that took 20 days to close intercompany, and a practice with a client posting over 200 lines of intercompany journals a month, all reconciled by hand.
Alex: It's a cycle: recharge, reconcile, repeat. You recharge shared costs like wages, marketing, stock and software, reconcile balances in spreadsheets or with ten Xero tabs open side by side, find the needle in the haystack, post the adjustment, move to the next pair, and start again next month. Most of you said it takes between two and ten hours a month, and for some much more.
Alex: How do the agents fit in? Translucent has always sat on top of your accounting software, bringing your Xero or QuickBooks data in for consolidation, intercompany, treasury and search. The agents sit on top of those products, work with them and add new capabilities. That's what I'll show you.
Alex: In jobs you control what the agent does and see the work in progress. You can pick a job from the list, but today I'll just ask in the chat: can you tell me the intercompany balances across my group? It starts straight away, and you can see it going to the intercompany tool. In split screen, our loan matrix shows one relationship between our UK and US businesses, with a discrepancy of £6,777. I've kept it small so it's easy to check, but with 60 entities and 30 discrepancies, it's much quicker for the agent to pull the detail, rank what needs attention and start working through the reconciliation with you.
Alex: It comes back confirming one active pair, the UK and US, with a discrepancy, and no other counterparty balances. I ask it to pull a list of all unreconciled transactions for August, and it produces an Excel file of every August transaction in the two entities, with the balance at the bottom.
Alex: Our original product matches transactions automatically when the date and total are identical. Real life is messier: one journal in the UK and five in the US, or the UK entry posted on the 1st and the US entry on the 22nd. Previously someone had to match those by hand. The agent understands all the unreconciled transactions and proposes the matches. It asks if I'd like it to try, and I say yes, reconcile them all.
Alex: You don't need to watch it, so I'll start another job. I upload our intercompany software subscription file for August and ask it to draft and post the journals to Xero. This file is simple, but if you were a 20-entity group with 20 journals in one file, it would check each journal balances and that the accounts exist across the group, then propose them for approval. Before anything is written back to your accounting software, it asks you first.
Alex: Back to the reconciliation: it found five matchable groups covering 19 of the 24 transactions. The first is group rent for August, £29,530 in the UK and the same in the US, posted on the 21st on one side and the 3rd on the other. I approve, and it writes the match into the intercompany product. Next, a revenue reallocation on the 7th and the 26th. Then a finance recharge with two journals on each side, US dollars against sterling, matched within an acceptable FX tolerance. When I refresh, those show as reconciled under my name, so there's an audit trail of who did what.
Alex: If a difference remained after matching, say £5,000 because one UK transaction has no US counterpart, the agent would work out the discrepancy and propose the adjustment to balance the two loan accounts. It looks like the journals screen I've just come from: the proposed journal, which you can edit, with tax rates and tracking categories, cash or accrual, draft or approved. Approve each one in turn and post.
Alex: One thing I didn't have time to show: the agent can also set up and tidy your intercompany chart of accounts. It reviews account names and codes across the group, creates the mappings in the matrix for you, and can rename accounts. That's very useful for a new client, or for tidying an existing group.
Alex: The intercompany agent is available to existing customers, so let us know if you'd like access, and we'll be in touch with everyone who joined today. Intercompany is one job, but the same skills, posting journals, reconciling balances and checking account names and codes, apply to lots of other work you do each month. That's what we'll cover next time. Thanks for joining.