What a transaction is
An intercompany transaction records one company’s side of a trade with another company in the same group. It points at a posted journal line on that company’s declared intercompany receivable or intercompany payable control account, and its amount must equal that line. A transaction raised on a receivable account is a Receivable side; one on a payable account is a Payable side. A customer or supplier counts as a sibling when it is linked to another company in the group. Alforse creates those links the moment a company joins the group. Sales and purchase invoices posted to a sibling tag the lines with the sibling as the intercompany partner. Each company raises only its own side. The seller records a receivable toward the buyer; the buyer records the mirror payable toward the seller.Recording one by hand
You can also create a transaction directly from the accounting Intercompany screen with IC Transaction (the form is titled New IC Transaction). Choose a Source Company and a Target Company, an Amount, a Description, a Debit Account, a Credit Account, and a Posting Date. The posting date defaults to today in the source company’s time zone, and the currency is the source company’s base currency. This posts a balanced on the source company, a debit line to one account and a matching credit to the other, tagged with the target as the intercompany partner, plus the tracking record. Use it for an adjustment, or for a position no invoice created. The rules, enforced by the server:- The source must be the company you are working in; you cannot raise the other company’s side.
- The target must be a different company that belongs to the same group.
- The amount must be positive, and the debit and credit accounts must differ.
- The journal must touch the company’s declared intercompany receivable or payable control account, for the same amount.
The matching lifecycle
Every intercompany transaction carries a status. It starts life at “Unmatched”, is paired to its counterpart by matching, and is retired by elimination.How a pair gets matched
Matching is a manual group-wide operation. Select Run Matching on the Intercompany screen. It needs approve access on intercompany control. The rule is deliberately strict. Two Unmatched transactions match only when they are true mirror images: company A → B pairs with company B → A, for the exact same amount and currency (to five decimals), within the same group. When Alforse finds such a pair it sets both to “Matched” in one step and links each to the other’s journal line. The result toast tells you how many matched and how many are still unmatched. If a transaction stays Unmatched after a run, its mirror does not exist yet. The usual cause is that the sibling company has not posted its invoice yet, or the two invoices are for different amounts. Post or correct the counterpart, then run matching again.Elimination
Elimination removes matched balances from consolidated reporting. Select Generate Eliminations to process every Matched transaction in the group. It needs post access on intercompany control. For each matched transaction, Alforse posts one elimination journal in that transaction’s own company: the exact negation of the journal lines the transaction references, described as “Eliminate intercompany …”. Because it reverses every line of that journal, a multi-line invoice is cleared in full and both control accounts clear to their exact balance. The seller’s receivable and the buyer’s payable are equal and opposite, so the group nets to zero. A matched transaction with no captured elimination lines is skipped rather than invented. Once the reversing journal is posted, the transaction flips to “Eliminated” and records the elimination journal, who eliminated it, and when. The run returns a count of the journals it created. Regenerate reverses the eliminations that already exist (with reversing entries, never deletes) and posts them again from the current state, so a correction can flow through without manual surgery.The intercompany balance
The Intercompany screen also shows a from / to balance matrix across the group’s companies and a running count of how many transactions sit at each status. The balance sums non-eliminated transactions only (receivable sides positive, payable sides negative): once a transaction is eliminated it drops out of the matrix. So a clean, fully-consolidated group shows zeros, and any non-zero cell is an intercompany position that hasn’t been matched and eliminated yet.Prerequisite: a multi-company group
Intercompany is only meaningful with a group of companies:- The company group ties the members together. The chart of accounts, currencies, and dimensions are shared at the group level, so every company posts against the same accounts. Members and their parent-child hierarchy are managed under company settings.
- Control accounts. Each company declares its intercompany receivable and payable accounts in accounting defaults; transactions must post to them.