Vestergaard Company immediately eliminates errors
15 minutes
spent on consolidating
Immediate
error spotting and elimination in financial reporting
The short story of Vestergaard Company
Vestergaard Company is a family-owned manufacturing company with headquarters in Lejre, Roskilde. Apart from Denmark, Vestergaard Company also has offices and production facilities in the USA, Thailand, and France. The company has more than 50 years of experience in manufacturing premium quality Ground Support Equipment (GSE) that fits the needs of the smallest commuter as well as the largest commercial aircraft. Today, the company’s focus is on de-icing machines, toilet and water servicing units, as well as aircraft washer units.
Financial consolidation in less than 30 minutes
Vestergaard Company decided in 2016 that it was time to change its accounting procedures. Before, the company only made a yearly financial consolidation. This process was changed, and now the financial team makes a monthly financial consolidation. To accommodate these procedural changes, Vestergaard Company wanted to use a tool that could automate some of their work. The team chose to work with Konsolidator® which has made their processes fast and easy.
Tine Holst is the Finance Manager at Vestergaard Company and she now uses less than half an hour on financial consolidation for the corporate group’s 4 companies thanks to Konsolidator®. The Vestergaard team has been able to significantly reduce the time they spend on financial consolidation because Konsolidator® automates many of the manual processes. The financial team was previously using Excel for financial consolidation.
Elimination of errors and manual processes improves the efficiency
CFO at Vestergaard Company, Torben Gerlach, has years of experience with Excel financial consolidation. Gerlach explained while consolidation in Excel is feasible, errors encountered are often a direct result of the Excel method – particularly because using Excel requires multiple people to work within the same spreadsheets. Using Konsolidator®, however, removes the probability of human errors because the system does all the math automatically. By converting from financial consolidation in Excel to Konsoldiator®, Vestergaard Company has been able to virtually eliminate all errors in its financial consolidation. Torben Gerlach elaborates: “With Konsolidator® you eliminate those sources of errors, you eliminate the manual processes.” – Torben Gerlach
Konsolidator® also has a reporting system that immediately sends alerts to users if it does, in fact, encounter an error that needs to be addressed, such as a balance not adding up. “The system reports the error, you see it and can fix it immediately. Where in Excel you might first discover an error half a year later. In this way, Konsolidator® is a very nice tool.” – Tine Holst
The financial team has saved time and become more efficient in large part due to the clarity they have gained into the figures and their origins. Everything is listed in Konsolidator®: the documentation, the formulas, and calculations. So, whenever the team must add or correct something, they make the corrections directly in Konsolidator®. The team no longer has to spend time asking their subsidiaries questions regarding specific figures – the audit trail is clear and documented. Torben Gerlach explains that if this was done in Excel there would have been a lot of errors and corrections that the team would have missed or would have had a hard time finding.
As a result of the time saved, the team now has more time to make in-depth financial analyses and draw insights from their numbers. Gerlach jokes: “Tine gets all excited sometimes because when everyone is done with the monthly status, she is using very little time on the actual consolidation process.”
Vestergaard Company is not only using the cloud-based financial consolidation software – Konsolidator® – they are also using Konsolidator Konnect, which is the presentation tool developed by Konsolidator. While any presentation tool can be used with Konsolidator®, Vestergaard Company has chosen to use Konsolidator Konnect. This gives the financial team at Vestergaard Company an additional bonus since Konsolidator Konnect enables instant and very flexible reporting as soon as the consolidation has been carried out.
Instant product updates and quick customer support
Credit: © Vestergaard Company
According to Tine Holst and Torben Gerlach, the financial team is happy that they found a simple and easily manageable solution. The workflow has overall run smoothly due to the fact that Konsolidator® is a truly cloud-based solution which means that all updates are run automatically. All users have the latest version of Konsolidator® without having to download, install or wait for the latest updates to be installed on their computers.
Operational wise there have been a very limited number of issues. The few times the financial team at Vestergaard Company has needed product support they have been very pleased with the fast and efficient service.
“We are all under time pressure when things go wrong in the consolidating process. The final thing which is made is the consolidation, so when it does not work you get really frustrated. Then you need help right away, and Konsolidator is very good at providing this help instantly.” – Torben Gerlach