The recent acquisition of a site in Ireland saw our client grow as a business from 300 employees across two sites in 2020 to 1,300 employees across five facilities in the UK, US and Europe.
Highly time-consuming and tedious manual work involving multiple spreadsheets had become a huge challenge for the company’s finance team. It was evident that a system-based solution was required to support business strategy, ease reporting and to smooth the process for future acquisitions. The Group Finance team needed to have dynamic, seamless reporting features with the ability to track against KPIs and have strong system-based controls in place.
Helixr’s experts were approached to propose and deliver a solution.
Helixr’s finance and tax technology experts knew that they needed to understand and unpick the complexities of the status quo to deliver a solution to maximise the business benefits. Our client had multiple accounting and ERP systems with different data standards, system controls and different levels of granularity in reporting outputs – this made it very difficult to report consistently against KPIs. The finance team relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets to perform monthly intercompany reconciliations, and MIS reports for each legal entity/business unit.
Inter-company processes had become difficult and highly complex as transactional recording and financial reconciliation were inconsistent and the ERP systems were not configured to manage inter-company reconciliations effectively.
The use of multiple functional currencies also added to the problems – the translation from transactional currency to local functional currency and then to group reporting currency was not consistently applied across different legal entities. Consolidation processes were delayed if there was any late adjustment in any one of the source entities.
The Group Finance team and Helixr’s subject matter experts worked together to review and evaluate a selection of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions from Anaplan, SAP Analytics Cloud, Oracle and OneStream. OneStream was selected based on the software functionality, the knowledge and quality of the sales and service team, its commitment to customer success, and the freedom to manage the system within the finance team, as opposed to the IT department, once deployed.
OneStream was deemed to be the only CPM solution that could meet all the short and long-term requirements for unifying management reporting, analytics, financial planning and the preparation of consolidated financial statements with a single, extendible solution.
Helixr supported the finance team to integrate the OneStream XF platform with multiple ERP systems SAP S4 HANA, Sage and QuickBooks. The OneStream Finance Consolidation system empowered each site/business unit finance team to be responsible for their financial reporting.
The OneStream solution we delivered has eased the consolidation process by matching inter-company workflows. It has made it easy to identify any missing transactions from one or other entity without the need to consult an Excel spreadsheet or source file. The intercompany transactions are reported in both local and translated reporting currency.
Now numbers can be drilled down to the transaction-level details in the same single platform. Any errors or mis-postings can be corrected early without causing late posting or missing month-end closure timelines.
Soon after the go-live, it was quite evident that the finance controllers for every site felt confident about the information they were reporting for management board packs. The new system has freed up the finance teams’ time to perform more value-added activities and provide the right inputs to the site general managers to drive the growth.
A phased approach was devised to deliver the full benefits of the OneStream Intelligent Platform. Phase one integrated the ERP transactional data into the platform to generate management and statutory reporting. The teams also enabled the rolling forecast and budgeting feature with the loading template function to perform the variance analysis at both group and business unit level.
The final piece of phase one was the group consolidation and executive dashboard, allowing the business to track progress and maximise efficiencies with real-time information. The dashboard is a powerful tool that allows the finance teams to deliver accurate information against KPIs to their board.
The solution the Helixr team implemented provides accurate real-time financial and operational insights to support faster and more informed decision making.
Helixr’s specialist Finance and Tax Technology practice achieves compliance and meets organisational goals by re-engineering and digitalising processes. We have extensive experience in delivering best practice and tailored solutions to meet clients’ business strategies.
We work with our clients to deliver data analytics and executive dashboards that enable simulation of what-if scenarios, driving finance and tax planning and cash flow decisions. We also support our clients by shining a light on opportunities to drive future business process improvements in their finance and tax functions.
On this project, by partnering with OneStream, Helixr was in a position where the team could deliver an intelligent financial platform and provide maximum business impact.
