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Dendooven, a Belgian financial advisory firm founded in 2019, partnered with EMAsphere in 2025 to give retail franchise owners consolidated, real-time visibility into margins, stock, and store performance. Using EMAsphere's finance-native data platform, the partnership cut financial reporting time for franchise networks from months to 20 days after month-end, combining sales, payroll, and revenue data that previously lived in disconnected systems.
At EMAsphere, we believe that the role of financial management is undergoing a profound transformation. Nowhere is this shift more critical than in the retail sector, where volumes are massive, margins are tight, and operational speed is everything.
If a retail store owner doesn't catch a margin loss early, the impact on revenue and cash flow can quickly become enormous. Yet many franchise owners are left operating in the dark, only finding out their true financial results months after a period ends, because they lack a way to quickly combine and analyse their numbers.
To explore how forward-thinking financial leaders are solving this challenge, we sat down with Ilse Dendooven, founder of Dendooven, an EMAsphere partner changing the status quo.
Who is Dendooven
Founded in 2019, Dendooven acts as a strategic financial partner for growing companies and SMEs. Their mission is to deliver clear, proactive financial insights to entrepreneurs, so they can make decisions based on real numbers, not gut feeling.
Where traditional accounting firms deliver figures six months after year-end, Dendooven works differently. They combine the precision of accountancy with the broad perspective of a CFO, helping companies not just understand the past but actively shape the future.
Their typical clients are growth companies and SMEs that are not yet ready to hire a full-time CFO but need solid financial foundations. Dendooven fills that gap: building the reporting frameworks, training internal teams, and laying the groundwork that makes it significantly easier to attract and onboard a top-tier CFO when the time comes.
"We no longer believe in a typical balance discussion after the balance date, because then you can't do anything with it anymore. We want to give proactive
advice, on the basis of current figures, presented in a smooth and readable way." — Ilse Dendooven, Founder, Dendooven
Why Dendooven partnered with EMAsphere
Ilse Dendooven had already used EMAsphere for clients in other sectors, including construction, before turning her attention to retail. When she started working with Frederik Van Landeghem, an entrepreneur running several franchise stores across Belgium, she saw an opportunity to build something bigger.
The realisation was clear: retail franchise owners all face the same structural challenges. They all need the same KPIs, the same margin visibility, the same consolidated view across stores. But nothing on the market was delivering that quickly and efficiently.
"I notice in the retail sector that everyone knows very well what they need. Franchise owners know how their margins per product group should look, but there's nothing available today that can quickly deliver those insights to them. Every percentage point of margin matters because of the volumes involved. If you only notice six months later that you've been losing margin on a product group, it's already enormous amounts, in both revenue and cash flow." — Ilse Dendooven
By anchoring her retail expertise on EMAsphere's platform, Ilse saw a way to turn a one-off client project into a scalable solution for the wider market. In 2025, Dendooven and EMAsphere formalised a partnership.
"Our mission at EMAsphere has always been to turn data into decisions. Partnering with Dendooven is a perfect illustration of that: combining their retail expertise with our platform to give franchise owners the financial visibility they need." - Arian Nachtergaele, Team Lead Sales Flanders & The Netherlands, EMAsphere
The retail challenge: turning scattered data to structured insights
When Dendooven started working with Frederik Van Landeghem, the challenge was not a lack of data. It was that the data was disconnected. Vital financial and operational numbers were scattered across different sources:
- Weekly sales data lived on the franchisor platform
- Employee hours and payroll data sat with the social secretariat
- Daily revenue numbers were managed separately
Combining these manually in Excel took too long, was prone to errors, and made real-time analysis impossible.
But before configuring any reporting tool, Ilse knew the data foundation had to be right. She helped the client transition their accounting from an external agency to an internal team, trained their staff, and worked closely with a newly onboarded internal CFO to establish clear frameworks.
"If you don't have a good framework in your bookkeeping and don't think upfront about what you want to report, how to report it efficiently, and how to combine the data — you won't get the right output to make decisions with." — Ilse Dendooven
Starting from scratch and building on a clean, well-structured foundation, the full reporting system was up and running within five to six months. Throughout the process, the EMAsphere team proved to be more than just a technology provider.
"What's great about working with EMAsphere is that the people are not just software and IT people. We can challenge our own preparation with them and ask: can we build this smoothly? They are true sparring partners who understand that management reporting has strict deadlines. When a board member or stakeholder needs data, it has to move fast and the EMAsphere team switches just as quickly." — Ilse Dendooven
Turning retail data into decisions
The retail-specific reporting framework built by Dendooven and EMAsphere is the result of a close collaboration between two complementary expertises.
Dendooven brought its deep financial knowledge of the retail sector, knowing exactly what franchise owners need to see, how margins work, and how to structure data to turn it into actionable insights.
EMAsphere brought both the technology and the financial expertise to bring that vision to life: a powerful data analytics platform, combined with a team that understands the realities of management reporting and speaks the same language as CFOs.
Together, they turned that combined knowledge into something concrete and immediately useful.
Drawing on Dendooven’s deep knowledge of the sector, the two teams defined the KPIs that matter most to franchise owners: margin per product group at any level of granularity, consolidated performance across stores, shrinkage and loss tracking per product group, personnel costs and hours worked, weekly revenues, and budgets versus actuals with year-over-year comparisons. Everything a retail owner needs to steer their business, in one place.
The result? Reporting that used to take months now happens within 20 days after month-end.
"Within 20 days after the previous month, we can report all the KPIs, results, and product margins. You can really steer based on numbers instead of gut feeling." — Ilse Dendooven
A scalable solution for the entire retail sector
What started as a single client project has become a replicable framework. The KPIs and templates built for Frederik Van Landeghem are now the foundation of Dendooven's retail offering, ready to be deployed for any franchise owner facing the same challenges.
And those challenges are universal. Whether it's food retail, clothing, or building materials, it always comes down to the same fundamentals: margin per product group, stock management, personnel costs, consolidated reporting across locations.
"It's very scalable because they all sell the same products and face the same challenges. I even think it extends beyond food retail to clothing, building materials, and so on. It always comes down to the same things." — Ilse Dendooven
Her ambition doesn't stop at retail either. With the retail framework complete, Ilse is already looking at the next sector to tackle, bringing the same methodology, the same rigour, and the same partnership with EMAsphere to a new market.
The retail framework built by Dendooven and EMAsphere is just one example of what becomes possible when sector expertise meets the right technology.
Curious what that could look like in your context? Let's talk