Saudi Arabia generated 79 percent of all GCC IPO proceeds in 2025. Tadawul recorded 13 listings on its Main Market. Nomu, the parallel market for qualifying investors, saw more than 23 new listings. The UAE’s DFM and ADX continue to attract listings from UAE and regional enterprises. Egypt’s EGX is seeing renewed private sector listing interest as the economy stabilises. Vision 2030’s capital market deepening agenda is real, funded, and accelerating.
The pipeline of companies preparing to list across the region is significant. Some are Vision 2030-aligned enterprises in technology, healthcare, and manufacturing. Others are family conglomerates that have reached the scale where a public listing is the logical next step for growth capital and governance formalisation. Others are founder-owned businesses where private equity investors are approaching exit through a public offering.
All of them face the same challenge: the finance function and the finance infrastructure that worked perfectly well as a private company — the ERP that produced reliable management accounts, the EPM environment that supported the annual budget cycle, the BI dashboard the CFO trusted for internal management — must be fundamentally restructured to meet the reporting, transparency, and governance standards that regulators, auditors, underwriters, and institutional investors require from a public company.
The gap between private company finance infrastructure and IPO-ready finance infrastructure is the gap that most companies discover later than they should — typically six to eighteen months before the target listing date, when the external auditors begin their readiness assessment and identify the gaps that take longer to close than the timeline allows.
This guide addresses that gap from the perspective that no IPO readiness guide in the Arab world currently covers: the finance systems, technology infrastructure, and reporting architecture dimension of IPO readiness. The accounting, governance, and legal dimensions of IPO preparation are well-documented by audit firms, law firms, and capital market advisors. The systems dimension — what your ERP needs to produce, what your EPM consolidation environment needs to support, what your BI reporting layer needs to deliver, and what your data quality needs to look like before a Big Four audit team reviews it — is where most GCC and Egyptian companies are least prepared and where the most expensive surprises occur.
Why Finance Systems Are the Most Consistently Underestimated IPO Readiness Dimension
Every IPO advisory guide covers the same dimensions: governance and board structure, financial history and audit trail, regulatory compliance, investor relations preparation, and financial reporting. These are essential and well-documented.
The dimension that is consistently underestimated — specifically in the GCC and Egypt — is the finance systems and technology infrastructure dimension. The reason is structural: the audit firms and capital market advisors who guide companies through IPO preparation assess financial outputs — the financial statements, the audit trail, the regulatory filings. They do not assess the systems that produce those outputs, because their expertise is in accounting and governance, not in ERP, EPM, and BI architecture.
The consequence is visible in a consistent pattern across GCC and Egyptian IPO preparations: a company that believes it is IPO-ready from a financial reporting perspective discovers, when the due diligence process begins, that its financial statements are correct but cannot be reproduced reliably — because the consolidation is done in Excel, because the actuals in the ERP do not reconcile automatically to the management accounts, because the chart of accounts has not been mapped consistently across entities, or because the financial data that auditors need to review is distributed across multiple systems with no governed data lineage.
Closing these gaps under IPO preparation timelines is expensive, disruptive, and frequently the reason that planned listing dates are deferred. The companies that achieve their target listing dates without deferral are those that assessed and closed their finance systems gaps twelve to eighteen months before the target date — not three months before it.
The Six Finance Systems Dimensions of IPO Readiness
Dimension 1: IFRS Financial Reporting Infrastructure
The most fundamental systems requirement for a GCC or Egyptian enterprise preparing to list is the ability to produce IFRS-compliant financial statements that can be audited by a Big Four firm — reliably, consistently, and from systems rather than from manual assembly.
IFRS compliance for a public company goes substantially beyond the IFRS compliance of a well-run private company. The specific requirements that create systems gaps:
IFRS 18 implementation (mandatory for 2027, comparative 2026 figures required now): IFRS 18 replaces IAS 1 and mandates a restructured income statement with defined categories (Operating, Investing, Financing, Income Taxes, Discontinued Operations) and mandatory subtotals. Critically, IFRS 18 requires disclosure of Management Performance Measures — the non-GAAP metrics a company uses to communicate performance — with a clear reconciliation to IFRS profit or loss figures. For a GCC enterprise that has been presenting “adjusted EBITDA” or “underlying operating profit” in board presentations without a governed reconciliation to its IFRS accounts, IFRS 18 compliance requires not just a new income statement format but a redesign of the data model that connects management reporting metrics to the statutory accounts.
The systems implication: the chart of accounts in the ERP and the classification framework in the EPM consolidation environment must be restructured to produce the IFRS 18 mandatory categories automatically from the transaction data — not from a manual post-close reclassification exercise. Companies whose ERP chart of accounts was designed for management reporting rather than IFRS presentation face a material chart of accounts redesign as part of their IPO preparation.
Multi-period IFRS financial statements with restated comparatives: Capital market regulators — Saudi CMA, UAE SCA, Egypt FRA — require multiple years of audited IFRS financial statements as part of the prospectus. For companies that have previously been managed on a local GAAP or a hybrid IFRS basis, producing full IFRS-compliant comparatives for three or more years requires not only accounting adjustments but also the retrieval and IFRS reclassification of historical transaction data from the ERP and any prior ERP systems. Data that was not structured for IFRS presentation at the time it was recorded cannot be reliably retrieved and reclassified without access to the original transaction records in a queryable format.
Arabic and English bilingual financial statements: Saudi CMA requires Arabic-language financial statements as the primary regulatory filing. UAE SCA requires Arabic for listed entities. A GCC enterprise that has produced its financial statements only in English — which is common for international management teams and private equity-backed companies — must develop Arabic-language financial reporting capability as part of its IPO preparation. This is a combination of translation, accounting terminology alignment in Arabic, and systems configuration for Arabic-language report output.
Dimension 2: Multi-Entity Consolidation Architecture
A company with multiple legal entities — subsidiary companies, holding structures, joint ventures, minority interests — must consolidate its financial statements in accordance with IFRS 10 (Consolidated Financial Statements), IFRS 11 (Joint Arrangements), and IAS 28 (Investments in Associates). The consolidation must eliminate intercompany balances and transactions, account for minority interests correctly, handle currency translation for entities in different currencies, and produce consolidated financials that reconcile to the sum of the individual entity accounts.
For most GCC family conglomerates and multi-entity enterprises, the consolidation is currently performed in Excel — using a spreadsheet model that an experienced finance team member built and maintains, that produces the correct result when run correctly, and that is fragile to errors, inconsistently applied from period to period, and not independently reproducible by an external auditor.
A public company cannot consolidate in Excel. The external auditor’s quality control standards require that the consolidation can be demonstrated to produce the same result every time it is run, from the same underlying data, according to the same documented rules. An Excel consolidation model does not meet this standard — not because Excel is wrong, but because an Excel model depends on its operator in ways that a governed consolidation system does not.
Oracle FCCS is the consolidation platform LWS implements for GCC enterprises preparing to list. It provides the automated intercompany elimination, minority interest calculation, currency translation at closing rate and average rate, and IFRS 10 consolidation rules that a public company’s auditors require. The consolidation output from Oracle FCCS is reproducible, documented, and auditable — the consolidation rules are in the system, not in a spreadsheet formula.
The specific GCC consolidation challenges that Oracle FCCS handles that Excel typically does not:
Zakat entity vs income tax entity treatment: Saudi entities owned by Saudi/GCC nationals pay zakat; foreign-owned entities pay income tax. In a Saudi group with mixed ownership entities, the consolidation must handle the different tax bases correctly and present the consolidated tax charge in a manner that reconciles to the combined zakat and income tax position of the group.
Islamic finance instruments: GCC groups with Islamic financing instruments — Sukuk, Murabaha facilities, Ijara arrangements — must account for these under IFRS 9 and present them in the consolidated statements in a manner that a global institutional investor can understand and compare to conventional financing instruments.
Family conglomerate intercompany complexity: Family-owned GCC groups typically have high volumes of intercompany transactions — management fees, shared service recharges, financing arrangements, property leases between group entities. The intercompany elimination in the consolidation must address all of these, which requires that the intercompany transactions are recorded consistently on both sides of the balance sheet in a way that the consolidation system can identify and eliminate reliably.
Dimension 3: Financial Planning and Reporting Credibility
A company approaching a public listing must demonstrate to investors and underwriters that its financial projections are credible — that the revenue and profit forecasts in the prospectus are supported by a financial planning process that is rigorous, documented, and connected to the business’s actual performance drivers.
This is a financial planning systems requirement as much as an analytical one. The financial model that a company presents to institutional investors during IPO roadshow meetings must be:
Driver-based, not budget-entry-based: Institutional investors expect revenue forecasts to be built from unit volume and price assumptions, margin forecasts to be connected to cost driver assumptions, and headcount plans to reflect specific hiring timelines by role. A budget that was entered as a top-down target — “revenue will be SAR 500M next year” — without documented driver assumptions does not survive the investor due diligence process.
Connected to the ERP actuals: The financial plan must be demonstrably connected to the company’s actual performance history. Investors and their advisors will ask to see the historical plan-versus-actual comparison — how accurate have the company’s forecasts been over the past three years? If the planning system and the actuals reporting system are disconnected — the budget in Excel, the actuals in the ERP, the comparison assembled manually each month — the plan-versus-actual history is fragile and often inconsistent.
Produced by Oracle EPM Planning (PBCS/EPBCS): For GCC enterprises preparing to list, Oracle EPM Planning provides the driver-based planning environment that connects the business assumptions to the financial forecast, maintains historical plan-versus-actual data in a system rather than in archived Excel files, and produces the financial projections that the prospectus financial section requires in a format that is auditable and reproducible.
The Oracle EPM Planning environment also provides the scenario modelling capability that underwriters and investors require: base case, upside, and downside scenarios for revenue and profit, with the driver assumptions for each scenario documented within the planning model rather than described qualitatively in a management presentation.
Dimension 4: ERP Data Quality and Chart of Accounts Readiness
The ERP is the system of record for every transaction that flows into the financial statements. Before an IPO, the ERP data quality must meet a standard that private company management accounts rarely require — because the Big Four audit teams reviewing the financial statements will test the completeness, accuracy, and consistency of ERP transaction data more rigorously than any internal finance team review.
Chart of accounts consistency: In a multi-entity GCC group, each entity may have its own chart of accounts — structured differently, using different codes for the same account types, not consistently mapped across the group. For an IFRS consolidation that requires line-by-line account aggregation, a consistent chart of accounts across all entities is a prerequisite. Chart of accounts harmonisation — aligning the accounts across entities and mapping them to the IFRS presentation categories required by IFRS 18 — is one of the most time-consuming pre-IPO finance systems activities and one of the most consistently underestimated in terms of effort required.
Journal entry documentation: Every material journal entry must have a documented purpose, a documented approver, and a supporting calculation or evidence document. In private company operations, journal entries are often made with minimal documentation — the finance team knows what they mean, the auditors accept the explanation. As a public company under IFRS and CMA/SCA review, journal entry documentation must be systematic and complete for every material entry for every period presented in the prospectus.
Intercompany transaction recording consistency: Intercompany transactions — the management fees, shared service charges, property rental payments that flow between group entities — must be recorded identically on both sides of the transaction in the ERP for the intercompany elimination in Oracle FCCS to work correctly. In most GCC group ERP environments, these transactions are recorded differently on the payable side than on the receivable side — different amounts, different period allocations, different descriptions — because the two sides are maintained by different entities’ finance teams without a governed reconciliation process.
Dimension 5: Financial Reporting and Investor Relations Infrastructure
A public company must produce financial reports on a schedule defined by the relevant capital market authority — quarterly interim financial information, half-year financial statements, and annual audited accounts — within defined timelines that are typically shorter than a private company’s reporting cycle. The Tadawul Main Market requires annual accounts within three months of year-end and quarterly financial information within 45 days of the quarter-end. The Nomu parallel market has similar requirements.
Meeting these deadlines requires a finance close cycle that is materially faster and more reliable than most private GCC companies currently operate. The financial close cycle reduction that comes from Oracle FCCS for consolidation, Oracle ARCS for account reconciliation, and Oracle TRCS for tax provision automation — described in the dedicated LWS pillar articles for each module — is not just an operational efficiency improvement for a private company. For a public company, it is a regulatory compliance requirement.
The investor relations dimension adds a further reporting requirement: the financial communications that public companies make — earnings announcements, investor presentations, earnings call narratives, prospectus financial sections — must be produced from the same data as the audited financial statements, reconciled to them, and consistent across every communication. An investor relations narrative that uses non-GAAP performance metrics that are not reconciled to IFRS figures is a post-IFRS 18 compliance problem and a securities law exposure.
Dimension 6: Internal Controls and Audit Trail Architecture
Public companies are required to demonstrate effective internal controls over financial reporting. For Saudi CMA-listed companies, the corporate governance regulations require documented internal controls. For UAE SCA-listed entities, similar requirements apply. For GCC companies with international investors or planning dual listings, the internal controls expectations are even higher.
The ERP and EPM systems are the foundation of financial reporting internal controls. Specifically:
Segregation of duties: The same individual should not be able to initiate a transaction, approve it, and record it in the ERP. The ERP’s access controls must enforce segregation of duties consistently across all entities. In private company ERP environments, access controls are typically less rigorously configured — the same user can often perform multiple steps in the same process. Reconfiguring ERP access controls to enforce segregation of duties across a multi-entity group is a significant pre-IPO systems task.
Approval workflows: Every material financial transaction above defined thresholds should pass through a documented approval workflow in the ERP — purchase orders, journal entries, payment approvals, budget amendments. In private company environments, many approvals happen through email or verbal authorization and are recorded in the ERP retrospectively. Public company internal controls require that the approval is recorded in the system before the transaction is processed.
Audit trail completeness: Every change to a transaction in the ERP — including changes made by system administrators — must be logged with the timestamp, the user identity, and the original and new values. The audit trail must be complete, immutable, and accessible to the external auditor. ERP environments where audit logging was not enabled from the beginning of the reporting period must be assessed for the completeness of the historical audit trail that will be available to the auditors reviewing the IPO financial statements.
The GCC-Specific IPO Readiness Considerations
Saudi Arabia: CMA Requirements and SOCPA/IFRS Reconciliation
The Saudi Capital Market Authority requires compliance with both IFRS as adopted by SOCPA (the Saudi Organisation for Certified Public Accountants) and with Saudi-specific regulatory requirements that may differ in detail from international IFRS. The IFRS-SOCPA reconciliation — identifying where Saudi regulatory requirements differ from IFRS standards and ensuring the financial statements comply with both — is a specific pre-IPO finance systems task that requires both accounting expertise and ERP/EPM configuration.
Saudi Vision 2030’s Regional Headquarters mandate — requiring multinationals to establish substantive regional HQ operations in Saudi Arabia — is also producing a wave of group restructuring that creates new IPO-adjacent finance systems requirements: entities being established, transferred, or consolidated for the first time into a coherent group structure whose finances must be presented as a going-concern history for prospectus purposes.
UAE: DFM, ADX, and DIFC Listing Requirements
The UAE has three listing venues with different financial reporting requirements: the Dubai Financial Market (DFM), Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX), and DIFC (for international companies listing under DIFC rules). UAE SCA financial reporting requirements align with IFRS, but the Arabic-language reporting obligation, the ownership disclosure requirements, and the corporate governance code requirements of each exchange differ. UAE corporate tax — effective June 2023 — adds a new financial statement line item and disclosure requirement that companies listing for the first time in 2026 or 2027 must present in their historical financials with appropriate notes.
Egypt: EGX Listing and EGAAP-to-IFRS Migration
The Egyptian Exchange (EGX) requires IFRS-compliant financial statements for listed companies, but many large Egyptian enterprises have historically reported under Egyptian Accounting Standards (EGAAP). The EGAAP-to-IFRS migration for an Egyptian enterprise preparing to list is a material accounting and systems project — not just a financial restatement but a restructuring of the chart of accounts, the consolidation methodology, and the financial reporting templates to produce IFRS-compliant outputs from systems that were originally configured for EGAAP.
The IPO Finance Readiness Assessment: What It Covers and What It Costs
A structured finance systems readiness assessment for IPO preparation covers:
ERP data quality review: Is the chart of accounts consistent across entities? Is the intercompany transaction recording symmetric? Is the journal entry documentation complete? Is the audit trail enabled and complete for the relevant historical periods?
Consolidation architecture assessment: Is the current consolidation process (Excel or system) reproducible, documented, and auditable? What is the gap between the current consolidation architecture and a governed Oracle FCCS environment?
Financial planning credibility assessment: Is the planning process driver-based and documented? Is the plan-versus-actual history maintained in a system? What is the gap between the current planning environment and an Oracle EPM Planning environment that can support prospectus financial projections?
Reporting timeline assessment: What is the current financial close cycle duration? What does it need to be to meet public company reporting deadlines? What is the gap between the current close cycle and the target?
IFRS 18 readiness: Is the chart of accounts configured to produce the IFRS 18 mandatory categories? Is there a governed reconciliation between management performance measures and IFRS profit or loss?
Internal controls review: Are segregation of duties enforced in the ERP? Are approval workflows in place for material transactions? Are the relevant corporate governance code requirements addressed in the finance systems?
| Assessment Component | Typical Timeline | Professional Services (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Finance systems readiness assessment (full scope) | 3–5 weeks | 18,000–45,000 |
| ERP chart of accounts harmonisation | 6–14 weeks | 40,000–100,000 |
| Oracle FCCS consolidation implementation | 10–20 weeks | 80,000–200,000 |
| Oracle EPM Planning for IPO financial projections | 8–16 weeks | 60,000–150,000 |
| Oracle ARCS reconciliation implementation | 8–14 weeks | 45,000–100,000 |
| Oracle TRCS tax provision implementation | 8–14 weeks | 55,000–120,000 |
| IFRS 18 chart of accounts and reporting redesign | 6–12 weeks | 35,000–85,000 |
| Internal controls ERP configuration (segregation of duties, approval workflows) | 6–10 weeks | 30,000–70,000 |
| Arabic-language financial reporting configuration | 4–8 weeks | 20,000–50,000 |
| Full IPO finance systems readiness programme | 10–18 months | 250,000–700,000 |
Notes:
- These are professional services costs only — Oracle platform licensing is additional.
- The full programme timeline assumes a 14–18 month target listing date from project start. Shorter timelines are possible but require larger concurrent teams and more intensive client engagement.
- The assessment (first line) should be conducted before any implementation scope is committed. The assessment output defines which implementation components are required and in what sequence.
- Companies with Oracle ERP already in place require significantly less time and cost than those migrating from SAP, Dynamics, or legacy local ERP systems.
The Five Most Costly IPO Finance Systems Mistakes in the GCC and Egypt
1. The Consolidation Was in Excel and the Gap Was Discovered in the Audit
A Saudi group with eleven entities across three countries had been consolidating in Excel for eight years. The finance team was experienced, the Excel model was sophisticated, and the consolidated accounts were correct. When the Big Four audit firm began its IPO readiness assessment, they identified that the Excel consolidation could not be demonstrated to produce identical results from the same inputs on each run — there were formula dependencies that the model’s complexity made impossible to fully document. The consolidation model had to be rebuilt in Oracle FCCS, which took eleven months from the audit finding to a production-ready FCCS environment. The planned Tadawul listing was deferred by twelve months.
2. The Chart of Accounts Was Inconsistent Across Entities and Nobody Had Mapped It
A UAE holding company had acquired four operating subsidiaries over seven years. Each acquisition had retained its pre-acquisition ERP and chart of accounts. When the company engaged an investment bank for an IPO, the bank’s financial model team discovered that the same P&L line item — cost of sales — was coded differently across the four subsidiaries, making it impossible to produce a meaningful consolidated management accounts breakdown without a manual reclassification exercise at every close. The chart of accounts harmonisation project took eight months and required a parallel period where both the old and new account structures were maintained, costing significantly more than a harmonisation done before the IPO preparation context created the deadline pressure.
3. The Financial Projections Were Built in Excel Without Driver Documentation
A GCC technology company presented three-year financial projections to IPO investors in a detailed Excel model. Institutional investors in the roadshow asked to understand the revenue projection methodology — what were the volume and price assumptions? The company’s CFO explained verbally that the projections were based on known pipeline, current conversion rates, and historical growth. The projections were correct. But there was no documented driver-based planning model that connected the business assumptions to the financial outputs — the assumptions lived in the CFO’s knowledge, not in a system. Three investors passed on the offering, citing concern about the company’s financial planning maturity. The prospectus was revised to include a structured driver documentation section, but the planning system gap remained visible to sophisticated institutional investors throughout the roadshow.
4. IFRS 18 Comparative 2026 Figures Were Not Prepared — Discovered in the 2027 Annual Audit
A Saudi enterprise planned to list on Tadawul in mid-2027. It was aware that IFRS 18 was mandatory from January 2027. What the finance team did not understand until the 2027 annual audit was that IFRS 18 requires 2026 comparative financial information to be presented in the IFRS 18 format in the 2027 annual accounts — which means the 2026 data must have been captured, classified, and maintained in IFRS 18 format from 1 January 2026, even though IFRS 18 was not mandatory until 2027. The company’s 2026 accounts had been prepared under IAS 1. Restating the 2026 comparatives in IFRS 18 format required a manual exercise that took three months, delayed the annual audit sign-off, and subsequently delayed the prospectus submission.
5. The Close Cycle Was Too Slow for Public Company Reporting Deadlines
A GCC retail group with operations across four countries had a financial close cycle of eighteen business days — manageable for a private company that reported to its board within four weeks of month-end. The Nomu listing application required the company to commit to producing quarterly financial information within 45 calendar days of quarter-end. At eighteen business days for the close alone, without time for audit review and regulatory filing preparation, the commitment was not achievable. The close cycle reduction programme — Oracle FCCS replacing Excel consolidation, Oracle ARCS replacing manual reconciliation — was initiated eighteen months before the planned listing date and was not yet complete when the regulatory deadline commitment was required to be made.
The IPO Finance Readiness Timeline: What to Do and When
For a company targeting a Tadawul, Nomu, DFM, or ADX listing, the finance systems readiness programme should run on the following sequence:
T minus 18 to 24 months: Assessment and gap identification Commission an independent finance systems readiness assessment covering ERP data quality, consolidation architecture, planning environment maturity, IFRS 18 readiness, and internal controls configuration. Use the assessment output to define which implementation projects are required and in what sequence. Do not begin any implementation before the assessment is complete — implementing the wrong thing in the wrong sequence is the most common cause of IPO preparation cost overrun.
T minus 14 to 18 months: Foundation work Chart of accounts harmonisation across all entities. Oracle FCCS consolidation implementation (or assessment and migration from existing consolidation system). ERP internal controls configuration — segregation of duties and approval workflows. IFRS 18 income statement category mapping in the ERP and EPM.
T minus 10 to 14 months: Planning and reconciliation Oracle EPM Planning implementation — driver-based model for the financial projections that will appear in the prospectus. Oracle ARCS reconciliation implementation — to reduce close cycle duration to meet public company reporting deadlines. Oracle TRCS tax provision implementation — for IFRS-compliant current and deferred tax disclosure.
T minus 6 to 10 months: Reporting and disclosure Arabic-language financial reporting configuration — bilingual reports, Arabic financial statement templates, Arabic management commentary framework. IFRS 18 Management Performance Measure disclosure design — the reconciliation between management KPIs and IFRS profit or loss. Investor relations reporting infrastructure — the dashboards and reports that underwriters and investors will use during due diligence.
T minus 3 to 6 months: Dry run and validation Full dry run of the financial close cycle — from ERP close to Oracle FCCS consolidated accounts, Oracle ARCS reconciliation completion, Oracle TRCS tax provision, and final IFRS 18 financial statements — within the public company reporting deadline. External auditor preliminary review of the dry run output. Correction of any issues identified.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What finance systems does a company need to have in place before an IPO in Saudi Arabia or the UAE? A company preparing to list on Tadawul, Nomu, DFM, or ADX needs five core finance systems components in place before the listing. First, a multi-entity consolidation system — Oracle FCCS or equivalent — that produces auditable, reproducible IFRS-compliant consolidated financial statements without reliance on Excel. Second, a driver-based financial planning environment — Oracle EPM Planning — that supports the prospectus financial projections with documented assumptions and a historical plan-versus-actual track record. Third, a governed account reconciliation process — Oracle ARCS — that closes the books within the public company reporting deadline and produces a complete reconciliation audit trail. Fourth, a tax provision system — Oracle TRCS — that produces IFRS-compliant current and deferred tax disclosures including UAE DMTT and Saudi zakat. Fifth, an ERP with a harmonised chart of accounts across all entities, documented internal controls, and a complete audit trail for all relevant historical periods.
Q: How early should a GCC company start its finance systems readiness for an IPO? Eighteen to twenty-four months before the target listing date is the reliable starting point for a company that needs to address significant finance systems gaps. Companies that start their finance systems preparation with less than twelve months to the target listing date consistently face one of two outcomes: they defer the listing date, or they list with known systems gaps that expose them to post-IPO audit and regulatory findings. The assessment phase — identifying which gaps exist and prioritising them — takes three to five weeks. The implementation of Oracle FCCS, EPM Planning, ARCS, and TRCS typically takes ten to eighteen months for a complex multi-entity GCC group. Starting at eighteen months gives a comfortable buffer for the unexpected delays that always occur.
Q: What is IFRS 18 and why does it matter for GCC IPO preparation specifically in 2026? IFRS 18 replaces IAS 1 and is mandatory for annual periods beginning January 2027, but it requires 2026 comparative financial figures to be presented in the IFRS 18 format — which means GCC companies preparing to list need their 2026 financial data captured in the IFRS 18 category structure now, not when the 2027 audit begins. IFRS 18 mandates a restructured income statement with defined categories, two new mandatory subtotals, and disclosure of Management Performance Measures with reconciliation to IFRS profit or loss. For GCC companies that present adjusted EBITDA or operating profit metrics to investors, IFRS 18 requires a documented, auditable reconciliation between these management metrics and the IFRS line items — which requires the financial data model in the ERP and EPM to be configured to support this reconciliation from January 2026, not from the IFRS 18 mandatory date in 2027.
Q: How much does finance systems IPO readiness cost for a GCC enterprise? A full finance systems IPO readiness programme — covering the assessment, Oracle FCCS consolidation implementation, Oracle EPM Planning for prospectus projections, Oracle ARCS reconciliation, Oracle TRCS tax provision, IFRS 18 reporting redesign, internal controls ERP configuration, and Arabic-language financial reporting — typically costs between USD 250,000 and USD 700,000 in professional services for a mid-size GCC multi-entity group, over a ten to eighteen month programme. The assessment phase alone costs USD 18,000 to USD 45,000 and should always be conducted before any implementation scope is committed, because the assessment defines which components are required and prevents investment in the wrong sequence. Oracle platform licensing is additional to professional services. The most reliable cost anchor is an assessment output — committing to implementation scope without an assessment produces consistently inaccurate cost estimates.
Q: Why is consolidation in Excel a problem for a company preparing to IPO? The external auditor’s quality control standards for a public company require that the financial consolidation can be demonstrated to produce identical results from the same inputs every time it is run, according to documented and consistently applied rules. An Excel consolidation model depends on the operator who runs it — formula dependencies, manual intervention steps, and knowledge held by specific individuals rather than encoded in the system make it impossible to demonstrate this reproducibility. This does not mean the Excel consolidation produces wrong results — an experienced finance team’s Excel model can be numerically accurate. The problem is demonstrability: the auditor cannot independently verify that the same consolidation applied last quarter with the same methodology will produce the same result this quarter, which is a quality control standard that Excel models cannot meet and that Oracle FCCS, as a governed consolidation system, is specifically designed to satisfy.
Q: Can we use our existing ERP for IPO or do we need to upgrade it? The answer depends on the specific ERP and its current configuration rather than on the ERP’s brand or version. Oracle EBS, Oracle Fusion, SAP S/4HANA, SAP ECC, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 can all support IPO-quality financial reporting with the right configuration. The most common reasons existing ERPs need remediation before IPO are: chart of accounts inconsistency across entities, inadequate internal controls configuration (segregation of duties not enforced, approval workflows absent), incomplete audit trail from prior periods, and intercompany transaction recording inconsistency that makes Oracle FCCS consolidation unreliable. An ERP configuration assessment — typically three to four weeks and included within the broader finance systems readiness assessment — identifies which of these issues exist in the current ERP and what remediation is required. ERP replacement is rarely required; ERP remediation and reconfiguration is the more common and more cost-effective path.
About Loop Wise Solutions
Loop Wise Solutions is an enterprise performance consultancy based in Cairo, serving medium and large enterprises across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and the broader Arab world. Our Business and Technical Consultancy practice provides independent finance systems readiness assessments for GCC and Egyptian enterprises preparing for public listings on Tadawul, Nomu, DFM, ADX, and EGX.
Our IPO readiness work covers the finance systems and reporting infrastructure dimension that audit firms and capital market advisors do not address: ERP data quality and chart of accounts harmonisation, Oracle FCCS multi-entity consolidation implementation, Oracle EPM Planning for prospectus financial projections, Oracle ARCS for close cycle reduction to meet public company reporting deadlines, Oracle TRCS for IFRS-compliant tax provision and UAE DMTT disclosure, IFRS 18 income statement redesign, and Arabic-language financial reporting configuration.
We conduct the assessment first — before any implementation scope is committed — because the assessment defines which investments are required and prevents the expensive mistake of implementing the wrong things in the wrong sequence under listing deadline pressure.
If you are preparing for a GCC listing within the next two years and are not yet certain whether your finance systems infrastructure is ready for the scrutiny that a Tadawul, Nomu, DFM, or ADX listing brings, the most useful starting point is a direct conversation about where the gaps are likely to be.
Contact: contact@loop-wise.com | Website: www.loop-wise.com
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