Every organization with distributed operations faces the same data challenge: the spokes generate data in their own systems, on their own schedules, using their own definitions — and the hub needs a single, trustworthy view of what's happening across all of them. This is the hub-and-spoke reporting problem, and it's one of the most common reasons organizations come to us.
The pattern shows up everywhere. A franchisor needs visibility into 200 locations running different POS systems. A private equity firm acquires five companies, each with a different general ledger and chart of accounts, and the CFO needs consolidated financials by next quarter. A corporate parent rolls up subsidiary performance reports that don't use the same metric definitions. An industry association tracks outcomes across member organizations that report on different timelines and in different formats.
The underlying problem is always the same: how do you create a single pane of glass when the data behind it is fragmented by design?
What Hub-and-Spoke Reporting Actually Requires
The temptation is to start with the dashboard — to build the view the CFO or executive team is asking for. But the dashboard is the last step, not the first. Hub-and-spoke reporting requires four layers, built in order:
1. Data Normalization
Before you can compare anything, you need to make things comparable. When subsidiary A records revenue on a cash basis and subsidiary B uses accrual accounting, 'total revenue' is a meaningless number until you normalize. When one franchise location reports food cost as a percentage of gross sales and another uses net sales, the comparison is apples to oranges.
Normalization means defining a common data model — a shared chart of accounts, a standardized set of KPIs, a consistent way of calculating each metric — and mapping every spoke's data into it. This is the hardest and most valuable part of the work. Everything downstream depends on getting this right.
2. Data Integration
Once you know what the common model looks like, you need to get data from each spoke into it. This means building pipelines that pull data from each source system — whether that's a different ERP, POS, accounting platform, or Excel export — clean it, transform it into the common model, and load it into a central data warehouse.
The integration challenge scales with the number of spokes and the diversity of their systems. A PE firm that acquires companies using SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Sage needs five different extraction and transformation pipelines. This is data engineering work, and it needs to be reliable enough that finance teams trust the numbers that come out.
3. Business Logic
The common model needs business rules that reflect how the hub thinks about performance. How do you allocate shared costs across subsidiaries? How do you handle intercompany transactions? What's the definition of same-store sales when some locations opened mid-period? How do you treat acquired entities in year-over-year comparisons?
These aren't technical questions — they're business decisions that need to be made explicitly and encoded into the data model. When they're made implicitly (or differently by different analysts), you get the familiar problem: three people in a meeting with three different versions of revenue.
4. Reporting and Access
Only now do you build the dashboards. With normalization, integration, and business logic in place, the reporting layer is straightforward: consolidated P&L views, location or subsidiary scorecards, trend analysis, variance reporting, and drill-down from the portfolio level to individual entities.
The most effective hub-and-spoke reporting systems serve two audiences simultaneously: the hub (CFO, executive team, board) gets the consolidated view they need for strategic decisions, while each spoke (location manager, subsidiary controller, franchise operator) gets their own performance view in context — how they compare to peers, where they're ahead or behind plan, and what's driving the variance.
Where We See This Pattern
Hub-and-spoke reporting isn't a niche problem. It's a structural feature of how many mid-market organizations operate:
- ✓Private equity portfolio consolidation. The acquiring firm needs consolidated financials across portfolio companies, often within 90 days of close. Each company brings its own ERP, GL structure, and reporting cadence. The CFO needs a single view that supports both operational management and investor reporting. We've built these consolidation layers for PE-backed organizations where the alternative was a team of analysts manually reconciling spreadsheets every month.
- ✓Multi-brand franchise operations. Franchise groups running 50, 200, or 500+ locations need cross-location visibility into revenue, labor, food cost, and operational KPIs. When locations run different POS systems or the franchise has acquired multiple brands, the data diversity makes direct comparison impossible without a normalization layer.
- ✓Corporate subsidiaries. Companies that grow through acquisition often maintain separate systems for each subsidiary — sometimes for years. The corporate finance team needs consolidated reporting, but each subsidiary's data looks different. The choice is usually: force everyone onto one system (expensive, disruptive, slow) or build a data integration layer that normalizes across systems (faster, less disruptive, and often permanent).
- ✓Associations and cooperatives. Member organizations, store cooperatives, and industry associations need to aggregate performance data from independent member entities. The challenge is that participation is voluntary, systems vary widely, and the association has limited authority to standardize. The data strategy must accommodate this flexibility.
For a nationwide electrical contractor, we designed finance dashboards that gave leadership a single source of truth across the organization — replacing fragmented reports with views that finance teams could navigate independently. The same pattern applies at any scale.
The CFO's Single Pane of Glass
The most common request we hear is some version of: 'I need one place where I can see what's happening across all our entities.' The CFO or VP of Finance is usually the one asking, and the pain is real — they're spending days each month assembling reports from different systems, reconciling numbers that don't match, and presenting data they're not fully confident in.
What they actually need is:
- ✓Consolidated financial statements that roll up automatically from subsidiary or location data
- ✓Variance analysis by entity — where is each unit vs. plan, vs. prior year, vs. peers?
- ✓Drill-down capability — the ability to go from portfolio-level numbers down to individual entity detail without switching tools
- ✓Timeliness — monthly close data available in days, not weeks
- ✓Auditability — the ability to trace any number back to its source system and understand how it was calculated
Building this isn't a dashboard project. It's a data infrastructure project that happens to produce dashboards as an output. The investment is in the normalization and integration layers; the reporting is the visible tip of the iceberg.
How to Get Started
If you're facing a hub-and-spoke reporting challenge, the most productive starting point is an assessment of what you have today:
- ✓Inventory your systems. What source systems exist across all spokes? What data does each one contain? How is it currently extracted for reporting?
- ✓Map your metrics. What KPIs does the hub need to see? How does each spoke currently calculate them? Where do the definitions diverge?
- ✓Identify the highest-value consolidation. Which view would have the most impact if it existed tomorrow? For most organizations, it's the consolidated P&L with drill-down by entity. Start there.
- ✓Design the common model. Define the shared chart of accounts, the standard KPI calculations, and the business rules for consolidation. Get agreement from finance leadership before building anything.
Our data strategy and
analytics & BI practices specialize in exactly this kind of multi-entity reporting infrastructure. Whether you're a PE firm closing an acquisition, a franchise group scaling past 100 locations, or a corporate parent tired of reconciling subsidiary spreadsheets — the pattern is the same, and we've built it many times.