For small enterprises, finance teams will often use spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel® for financial close, consolidation and reporting processes. But as the enterprise grows, whether organically or through acquisitions, the complexity of managing spreadsheets across multiple locations and departments can cause significant challenges for finance leaders.
Relying on Excel to reconcile, translate, consolidate, and report financial information was a challenge all too familiar for Royo Group. The manufacturer had been using a very time-consuming process of manually reporting data across international operations via spreadsheets. But they were able to break-free by upgrading to an enterprise-class corporate performance management (CPM) software solution.
OneStream Software sat down with Nicolás Salvador Sancho, financial director of Royo Group, to hear their unique experience upgrading from Excel spreadsheets to our intelligent finance platform. Read on to learn how they’ve gained more robust financial consolidation, reporting, and analysis capabilities.
About Royo Group
Headquartered in Valencia, Spain, Royo Group is a leading global group of companies that manufacture bathroom furniture, shower trays and columns to create spaces designed for your well-being. Royo Group is the leading pan-European industrial group in the field of bathroom and shower furniture, offering innovative and functional solutions for all types of families and lifestyles. With 48 years of history, Royo has grown significantly with more than 1 billion Euros in revenue at the end of 2018. Royo has factories and locations across Europe, America and Asia.
Challenges with Excel
The industry in which Royo Group operates in is a very atomized market, targeting those who buy highly customized products and services. To continue their growth, Royo Group looks to expand to other countries by incorporating additional companies through acquisitions. This led the Finance team at Royo Group to working mainly with Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint because many acquired companies were also using spreadsheets.
Royo quickly learned that each company had a different approach to financial consolidation and reporting processes, which generated a very high level of complexity. It was difficult for their Finance team to obtain similar levels of data from each location that was easy to understand and comparable. Each individual company was generating approximately 150 Excel files. The speed required to access, manage, and analyze this incoming data became far too difficult. A modern solution was needed.
Upgrading to an Intelligent Finance Platform
After seeing a demo of the OneStream platform, Royo Group knew that it was time for an upgrade. The platform’s ability to seamlessly homogenize all information across companies was a driving factor in choosing OneStream. Today, the company is reaping the benefits of a modern and unified platform that is the single source of truth for all data.
Having all data available in the same environment, with the ability to dig deeper into levels of detail on demand, has been a game-changer for Royo Group. The speed and agility that OneStream delivers was simply not possible with Excel. Royo is repurposing staff hours previously spent on reporting to better analyzing the data. Royo Group plans on incorporating additional solutions from the OneStream MarketPlace, like Capital Planning, to bring added value to their solution with more reliability and integrity in the data they report.