In 2016, Accru Felsers began assisting a large real estate investment organisation which manages numerous investment vehicles in Australia for overseas investors. Like many global businesses, their ability to efficiently process and interpret large amounts of financial information for various purposes was a critical concern. Here’s how Accru helped.
The problem – double handling of financial data to create reports
Our client required accounting and financial reporting at many different levels of their business: the Asset level, Australian entity level, overseas entity level, and investor level. Before coming to Accru Felsers, much of their financial information was being double handled by their property managers and accountants in order to achieve suitable reports at these levels for various stakeholders. There was a different system being used at each level making it difficult to integrate the information between the systems, and our client’s small internal team in Australia neither had the time, nor the means, to link them.
This situation created a two-fold problem – it hindered the client’s ability to meet the deadlines for reporting to their head entity… and it was expensive. The client was paying multiple organisations to reprocess the same information.
The solution – automated and integrated reporting
After meeting with our clients to gain a thorough understanding of their requirements, Accru Felsers successfully addressed both of these issues, starting with a video to demonstrate our solution to ensure the client’s overseas management would be comfortable with it.
Our solution involved implementing a number of customised macros through Visual Basic in Microsoft Excel to simplify and speed up the processing of mass amounts of data. This enabled us to easily export, edit, and reimport data between the different systems being used by the client. This streamlining of data processing ensured that, at each level, information was added onto the prior level with no double handling of the old data. We are continuously improving this process with the implementation of APIs in order to remove even more of the manual labour involved.
The client benefit – greater financial insight, with less time and cost
The removal of manual processing has saved countless hours and dollars for the client and achieved the desired reporting schedule of the head entity. It also means that Accru Felsers has reduced the time spent on the processing of data and can focus on providing insights into the data to help improve the client’s business.
We are now investigating other processes to provide innovative and efficient solutions such as dashboards which will allow the client to dig deeper into their data and quickly understand what it is telling them.
Accru’s perspective – a rewarding experience
At Accru, we love finding solutions like these to our clients’ business and financial issues. It helps us grow mutually beneficial partnerships, both locally and internationally. I am personally looking forward to continuing to work closely with this client to ensure their financial management is as effective and tailored to their needs as it can be.
It’s interesting to note that, in 2010, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said “There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing.” At Accru, we aim to use technology to its fullest to efficiently process these massive amounts of data so we have time for value added services that can provide our clients with greater benefit. It’s a win-win – one I personally find rewarding and challenging.
