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.

Can you call me tomorrow? I am having some issues. 864-882-3272 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM EST