"Without BrightAnalytics, we would be fiddling with Excel lists, doing manual consolidations, and making errors more easily."

In about a day and a half, reliable and comprehensive reporting

CFO Tim De Reyck became acquainted with BrightAnalytics as an early adopter back in 2017 when he was leading his own startup. The advantages of the software were so clear to him that, after selling his company, he proposed to his new employer, Technics & Applications, within the first week to replace the complex, time-consuming Excel reporting with the flexibility and convenience of BrightAnalytics.

“I started collaborating with BrightAnalytics fairly soon after the founding of my software startup,” Tim begins. “It was still a very young startup at that time, and yet, after a demo and a conversation with one of the founders, I was quickly convinced to partner with them. We had ambitious plans at the international level, with branches in Poland and China, among others. I wanted to quickly connect the diverse accounting packages in different countries.” The choice for BrightAnalytics was a no-brainer for Tim, as he puts it himself: “They not only offered tremendous flexibility but also an upload functionality in the cloud, on which I could apply my own management layer/mapping. Without BrightAnalytics, we would be fiddling with Excel lists, doing manual consolidations, and making errors more easily. So, I was convinced early on of the capabilities of the package.”

Strong in mergers and acquisitions

Five years later, when Tim sold his startup and became CFO at Technics & Applications, one of the investment companies of Waterland Private Equity, he continued to leverage BrightAnalytics. “T&A has production sites in Belgium and France but is constantly looking for mergers & acquisitions to add more companies to the group,” Tim continues. “From our past collaboration, I knew that BrightAnalytics excelled in this area. When Waterland Private Equity became the majority shareholder at T&A, we had a relatively complex structure of different companies, each using different ERP packages: from Wings to Exact Online and Odoo to Navision. Without a package like BrightAnalytics, setting up consolidation is almost impossible. My predecessor did all of this in Excel. But in that reporting, I found a lot of inconsistencies.”

Therefore, he decided almost immediately to stop the manual reporting method and introduce BrightAnalytics. “In the first week that I worked at T&A, I brought it up: ‘If you want decent, fast management reporting, I want to go for BrightAnalytics.‘ Management was quickly convinced. I didn’t feel the need to compare with possible alternatives anymore. I was used to working with BrightAnalytics and was satisfied with the functionalities and support.”

Only benefits

The ERP packages were linked, and a robust management structure was established, allowing Tim to present solid management reporting to Waterland Private Equity. “The whole integration took barely two months in total, which is very little given the complexity of the different packages. The enormous flexibility we have to quickly upload data from different ERP packages and the ease of converting it into the management structure that we can build ourselves are significant advantages. Both the elimination of intercompany transactions and the consolidation now run much smoother. Moreover, we save a tremendous amount of time: when the accountants were finished, my predecessor spent another five full days on reporting. Now, we complete it in about a day and a half, including management and board reporting. The difference is gigantic.”

Tim knows that he can fully trust the figures. “We are now transitioning from the old Navision to Microsoft Dynamics Business Central. Many companies add a business intelligence layer on top to extract the data they need. Purely for financial purposes, this is not necessary for me because I rely on BrightAnalytics and the setup we have created in the package.” He also evaluates the collaboration and support positively: “Sometimes things hiccup, but that happens everywhere. The most important thing is that the BrightAnalytics team is quick to respond. Their support is very good and responsive. Over the years, I’ve seen the organization grow, but I haven’t experienced it as a disadvantage. On the contrary, we are always helped quickly.”

Accurate day-to-day predictions

For the past few months, T&A has also been using the operational module of BrightAnalytics, providing insight into the pipeline across production companies. This, too, makes a significant difference. Tim explains: “We are known as a supplier for being able to deliver very quickly. This is crucial in the pool sector because customers want to protect their new pool from dirt and save energy as soon as possible. At the same time, measurements can only be taken when the concrete pool is dry. This means that we have very little time between measuring and delivering the cover. The fact that we can deliver very quickly has the downside of making it difficult to estimate how we will close the month, what revenue we will achieve, what the impact on inventory is, and what costs are involved. Hence our choice for the operational module: it allows us to make the most accurate predictions on a day-to-day basis and report to both the bank and shareholders about it. We also use the module to see how sales compare across customers, customer categories, and countries, both from a cost perspective and a revenue perspective. Knowing the distribution across key suppliers, for example, can help us negotiate better purchasing conditions. The module enables management to set and adjust strategic goals where possible, across companies.”