Integrated Solution

The choice for Board International as the preferred solution was a combination of the integrated solution, the flexibility and the reporting and dashboarding capabilities. Where many other solutions also have a lot of functionality, Board International is one of the few that has it all in one solution: Budgeting, Integrated Business Planning (or Extended Planning & Analytics (XP&A)), Financial Consolidation, Lease Accounting, Reporting, Dashboarding, Scenario Modeling, Predictive Forecasting and more. Add to that the possibilities of automating manual tasks and TriFinance had enough reasons to choose for Board International.

Goals and Roadmap

At the start, the first goal was to improve the budgeting process to support the growing organization. In addition, TriFinance wanted to move away from Excel (where possible) to create a combination of flexibility and security in the models in order to be able to react faster and better to changes. After the -more detailed- budget process, the forecasting process was improved via Board International. In the forecast, more attention is given to the revenue and its business drivers: consultants and net growth on a monthly basis. Every unit, also known as Blue Chip Boutique (BCB) and Expert Support Unit (XSU), is now able to forecast based on business drivers. From a reporting perspective, actuals budget and forecast can now easily be compared, reported and analyzed. The next step is to create more forecast accuracy and understanding where and why deviations occurred.

Furthermore, the monthly financial consolidation process and the annual report are now also integrated in Board International. The goal with Financial Consolidation was to overcome issues from the previous solution and automate a lot of steps in the process in order to reduce (the risk of) manual errors. In this project, Board Financial Consolidation was implemented including automatic data loading (instead of copy and paste), intercompany reconciliation and automated reports like P&L Balance Sheet and Cash Flow statement. As a result, the financial consolidation process is now efficient and transparent via automation, workflow management and checks. The last step of the TriFinance Roadmap with Board International so far is the annual report, where the data from Board International is automatically available in Word, enabling the writing of analyses and commentary for (external) stakeholders. Every change in the underlying data is automatically updated in the annual report, which makes life a lot easier.

The Results

At this moment budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation and almost all of our management reports including the annual report are implemented in a single solution: Board International. As a result:

1. There are less errors thanks to automation and checks
2. There are better insights via automated reports including business drivers
3. There is more transparency in the processes

“With the automated data loads, reports and other tasks, we now can spend more of our time analyzing as a business partner instead of spending most of the time in collecting and checking data.”