If you’re talking about the Group Consolidation module, then this improvement to add external reporting entities came in Apps 10 and I believe it’s not available in Apps 9.

The benefit of this setting is that you don’t need to create a full company but balances can be imported directly into group consolidation. It’s controlled based on this field against Reporting Entities:

However, a workaround in Apps 9 would be to create the external entities as companies and import the trial balance using a voucher import each period into the company’s GL.