Creating an action-driven reporting platform for a private equity firm to get daily financial insights from all portfolio companies.
Services
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Strategy
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Engineering
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Management
Our role
With a double-digit company portfolio, you want to have the financial reports of all your investments on a daily basis. In this use case a private equity firm that participates in multiple startups and scaleups needed to have a single source of truth about the financials of their portfolio companies to support and steer them in the right direction.
We advised a scalable data platform, implemented it and took it under management to unburden the financial controllers of our client so they can focus on what they do best: interpret the numbers.
The challenge
We were asked if we could find a way to get rid of the time-consuming discussions of financial data reports, to be in control of all the numbers of the fast-growing companies, and last but not least, lose the inconsistency of all kinds of reports.
We quickly found out the challenge was clear but still very complex: How to create one standardized financial reporting tool for all companies of the entire portfolio? How to integrate the variety of administration systems into one platform that the internal financial controllers are using on a daily basis.
The solution
Over the period of 6 months, a platform solution is designed, developed, integrated and fully operatable.
The solution that was created:
- A data platform based on standard Azure components that ingests more than 45 administrations on a daily basis.
- A scalable integration which maps five major administration vendors (AFAS, Exact) into one data model.
- PowerBI-controlled financial reports for the basic administration, like profit loss statement, balance sheet, cashflow, but also ageing analysis and account specific KPI’s to steer the business actively.
- A service license agreement (SLA) to manage the data platform and daily reporting with less than 3% data downtime.
The outcome
The outcome of this project was the direct improvement of the actionable advice to the management of the portfolio companies. Immediate added value due to the focus on the steering was realized, time that usually was put into the manual alignment of the financials. For the startup and scale-up companies we created a self-service loop for the financial controllers when reports and transactions were not entered correctly. So, an old-fashioned win-win for both the equity private firm and the portfolio companies.