Just to be clear: you want to copy the data from 5 companies into one company database?

Yes, that is correct....5 companies consolidated into 1 company.

Are you doing this for reporting, or are you in real life combining? I too manage 5 companies, and I consolidate them for financial statements.

We are doing it for financial statements. How are you combining your 5 companies into one for financial statements?

We use F9 for financial reporting, consolidation is easy. You can try Sage Intelligence for reporting, but to be honest we tried it and it was terrible, complex, slow.... tedious comes to mind. This does not require you to copy the data into one company.
Alternatively you can create a consolidation company and export/import GL transactions (summarized or in detail) and report from the consolation company.

I'm an MS Access developer and built my solution in house, however there are enhancements out there for doing this, for example www.acutedata.com/.../

My in house solution is to one at a time copy the tables one company at a time into an access database via ODBC, and report on that database rather than using Sage/Crystal.

You can also look at General Ledger, Utilities, General Ledger Exchange

If we end up creating a consolidated company, just for financial reporting, what all do I need to export from the existing companies to import into the consolidated company?

If we end up creating a consolidated company, just for financial reporting, what all do I need to export from the existing companies to import into the consolidated company?

From GL Exchange you can export/import GL accounts (you will need that) and GL account activity (summarized) or GL transactions (detailed). Decide if you want detailed or summarized transactions in the consolidated company and go with that.

DSD has and extended solution for this
www.dsdinc.com/.../

I'm with DSD so I am biased. I am more of a worker bee / user of the above referenced utility and can say I used the utility about a year ago for a customer who wanted to consolidate three separate Sage 100 companies into one company.

It's expensive -- but was a lot cheaper than trying to make a manual consolidation between multiple companies. From memory I do not recall anything overly complex. I may have had to add an inventory item or two just to make the merger/consolidation happen. In any case the utility gives you all the info about what you need to do before the actual merger/consolidation.

DSD acquired this enhancement about 6-9 months ago from ASI (which is where I originally bought it from).

However before I bought any enhancement I would definitely look at consolidating through a financial reporting tool. Sage Intelligence had a terrible reputation for a while but gradually it seems to have won over a number of consultants and one caveat is you need to thoroughly understand which components you'll need in order to do consolidations.

The most popular reporting tools seem to be:

BizNet (spreadsheet based)
F9 (spreadsheet based)
Renovo (very similar to FRx)
Sage Intelligence (spreadsheet based)

I am one of those consultants who is on the Sage Intelligence bandwagon. When it first came out, I couldn't stand the tool and would not have recommended it. Now though, the Report Designer Task Pane makes creating consolidated financials much easier, and I have been converting many of my clients from F9 and BizNet to it. It has gotten rave reviews from pretty much all of them.

I would also advocate to handle it through reporting if at all possible, because using a consolidated company can get very complicated very quickly!

Once I use GL Exchange, will I have to export/import our data from the beginning of time to the current, each quarter, or will I just export/import the new period's data? The reason I am asking is that I have run into several accounts that we have made inactive in the past and because of that, the GL batch is out of balance since it didn't export/import these inactive accounts transactions.

Are you exporting Budgets and Activity or Transactions?

Transactions and Budgets

Um, the options are Activity and Budgets, or Transactions.

I thought I could do just Budgets, then do Transactions. I didn't realize it was one of the other. So for the initial import/export, I am doing transactions. Next month, can I do Budgets and Activity or is it once you choose one option, you have to stick with it?

Pick one and stick with it. I would do Budgets and Activity, then select Account Activity and the year. You run this after each month and it will export the complete year - but only summarized data. You also select to include/exclude Active/Inactive/Deleted accounts.