After a period of significant growth and acquisition, our Client engaged Bridgewey to assist in streamlining the number of finance systems and processes used by their European and Asia Pacific companies. Prior to this project financial data was held in numerous legacy, unsupported or non-compliant systems.

Project Objectives

  • Bring all 28 businesses, made up of 20 operational companies onto a common, compliant and robust accounting platform.
  • Consolidate the group at different levels for different reasons, i.e. by region, by business type, and for the monitoring of deferred buyout considerations.
  • To enhance business processes through in-the-cloud versus on-prem systems.

Tasks

  • After assessing the clients internal controls and reporting requirements XERO and Fathom were selected due to the ease of rollout, the time to do so and the immediate impact that this would have on the Group of Companies.
  • As Xero is Software as a Service (SaaS) it was easy to scale to the needs of the business by expanding to the various regions (APAC, Europe and the USA)
  • Each business unit operated as an individual entity, hence the need for a consolidation platform; – Fathom works well with XERO in this respect.

As the Group continued its path of acquisition it was a straightforward process to add new entities due to the SaaS nature of XERO and Fathom.

Result

  • After a period of 8 months the entire group had reliable MI for its European and APAC regions for the current year and 3 previous years.
  • Common stable structured financial recording.
  • Common financial processes across the Group.