Post-Acquisition Data Integration

The reporting problem after an acquisition is rarely that the data is missing. It is that each company answers the same question in its own vocabulary. One runs SAP, one runs Dynamics, one runs something a local team built. Cost centres do not line up. A supplier is one relationship in one system and three records across the group. None of it is wrong locally, and none of it is comparable.

Supplier spend is usually where this surfaces first, and the failure is mundane. A supplier appears under its legal entity in one system, a brand name in another, and an old acquired-company name in a third. Until those records are treated as one relationship, the group can miss a rebate threshold it has already crossed. The same problem runs in reverse when intercompany invoices are counted as external spend and inflate the procurement baseline.

The usual response is a consolidation workbook, maintained by a controller who becomes the only person who can produce the group view. That works until it has to scale, or that person is unavailable, or someone asks how a number was derived and the answer is a chain of manual steps nobody logged.

Beetl connects the systems each company already runs, read-only, and keeps a source-faithful copy of what came out. The shared definitions become explicit: mapping tables, SQL, and rules that can be reviewed rather than assumed. When two records from two companies are treated as the same thing, the evidence for that decision stays attached to it.

The first deployment covers one operating group and its subsidiaries. It is deliberately not a pooled raw-data environment spanning unrelated portfolio companies. That boundary keeps the data model honest and keeps the isolation questions simple.