Financial Reporting and Consolidation Every comany is legally obliged to present reports to tax authorities. For medium sized and large companies this obligation can mean a large investment in time and effort. A BI financial reporting application can easily produce the necessary balance sheets and profit and loss reports, consolidating accounts from different cost centers. The consolidation should apply all aggregation rules such as, for example, the elimination of sales betwwen group companies, or exchange rate differences. Tipically these applications will produce internal management reports as well. One example could be a report for follow-up of unpaid invoices per client account. These applications normally have many dimensions, one per account, period, cost center, branch, currency, etc. This is why finance departments in large comanies were the first to use BI applications.