Adastra Group uses FinReCo for financial reporting and controlling

The Adastra Group’s financial controlling and reporting was based on using a data warehouse combined with information obtained directly from primary systems. The main controlling tool was a BI application connected to OLAP. Management reports drew some of their data from the data warehouse (accounting information) and the rest straight from the primary systems (employee data, time sheets). The lack of standardization in the information flow (ERP-DWH-OLAP-Reporting) resulted in the need to impose additional verifications on the reported data. The whole system and its related business processes were complicated, not completely standardized. Every change in the reports, including the addition of new divisions/companies, was extremely problematic, as the system had morphed over the years to comprise many exceptions and adjustments in what appeared to be the only way to meet the management’s requirements.

The data warehouse and the links to other financial and personnel reporting systems were maintained and administered by a single specialist. Working with accounting, financial and HR data ceased to be effective or efficient. Uniform business and financial terminology, master data management, was lacking. It was necessary to consolidate the source data (including local currencies, organizational structures, the allocation of indirect costs) and streamline financial processes across the Group. Dependence on the capabilities and availability of a single specialist proved to be a major problem for system administration and development. Data were uploaded to the data warehouse for about 5 hours overnight, and intraday increments took up to 2 hours.

The Adastra Group’s growth over the past 3 years rendered the previous system for financial management support insufficient, especially in terms of its capacity to take business requirements into account and ensure effective system administration. The Group acquired several start-ups specializing in specific fields of the IT industry, and experienced immediate increases in multiple areas – in the number of suppliers and customers, the number of branches around the world and the number of employees working in them.

The Group implemented its own FinReCo solution. It is a pre-prepared data warehouse with an integrated finance data module that enables real-time financial reporting.

The project’s main goals were:

• To prevent the change in systems having a negative impact on business users.
• To increase process standardization and master data unification.
• To ensure near real-time data updates.

To meet these goals, the project team focused on the following, most important areas:

• Converting existing management reports into a visually similar style while preserving all original indicators (projected revenue reports, division income statements, project income statements including KPIs).
• Implementing broader options to compare timelines and reporting units.
• Creating a reporting portal to function as a single source of all management reports.
• Enabling access to financial data using any tool of the end user’s choice (Microsoft Reporting Services, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, Pyramid Analytics).
• Managing several levels of authorization.
• Unifying terminology – i.e., setting naming conventions across all branches and companies.
• Implementing a master data management tool (using the RDM from sister company Ataccama).
• Optimizing data loads into the data warehouse to update reports in near real-time.

Deploying FinReCo and putting it into operation across the Adastra Group took 9 months. The time needed for the Adastra Group CFO to close regular monthly reporting has now been reduced from several days to 2 hours. Adastra considers the data in FinReCo (updated every 15 minutes) to be the single source of truth for all financial information. The system allows the data to be viewed from two perspectives:

1. Business – consolidated, intended for the management of the Group’s branches and individual companies, as well as for the owners of the holding group.
2. Financial – very detailed, intended for the employees working in the controlling and financial department, which has many dimensions and metrics.

The reporting process is managed with FinReCo, i.e., everyone knows when reporting opens, when they have to supply their inputs, and how consolidation takes place. Responsibility for the data is also clearly set. Thanks to FinReCo, the financial department, the management of all the branches and companies, and Adastra’s individual business units work faster, more efficiently, and with the same numbers, which was previously not the case. They also employ unified terminology, which is binding for the entire holding group. Users can choose whether they prefer to work with the reports in the numerical form of a classic spreadsheet or in a visually attractive format through Microsoft Power BI.

In addition to the project’s main goals, the team also focused on improving constituent parts that affect the financial departments’ productivity:

• Streamlining the process of closing periods and scenarios so that a given period/scenario can be repeatedly updated and closed within a few hours.
• Setting up support to edit dimensions in the data warehouse without having to change accounting transactions.
• Implementing a tool to automatically reallocate indirect costs to reported power units (full reallocation).
• Unifying reporting accounts management.