Customer story · CanClean
CanClean runs three companies on one platform, fed by Odoo every night
A Canadian truck wash group, CanClean replaced multi-entity Excel reporting with EMASPHERE, connected directly to Odoo. The result: 10 to 15 hours back every month.
About CanClean
CanClean Financial Group is based in Aurora, Ontario. The Canadian group brings together three companies, the largest of which washes heavy trucks: five centers along the highway, where trucks and their trailers, up to 30 meters long, are washed by hand. The group also runs a mobile cleaning business.
Alexis Vandame, VP Finance, runs both finance and operations, a role close to that of a COO. For thirty years he has been implementing ERP, CRM and point-of-sale systems, and building budgets, indicators and tracking reports. With several companies, several systems and specific adjustments, the group’s financial analysis goes well beyond a standard P&L and balance sheet.
Reporting that ran on Excel
Before EMASPHERE, Excel was at the heart of CanClean’s reporting, with Tableau and Power BI on top for visualization. Over the years, Alexis Vandame had built his own methods to extract the data, apply the adjustments and assemble the figures of the different companies. He knew that setup inside out, but it relied on his own files, on several tools and on several manual steps. He was looking for something more organized.
As he compared the solutions on the market, he looked closely at how the data was integrated. Some comparable solutions had no connection to the accounting system: he would have had to keep exporting the trial balance from Odoo, rework it, then import it. With EMASPHERE, the two systems are directly connected and the data is collected automatically every night. An ETL that runs all the time, and an entire step of the process that disappears.
A platform he configures himself
The Odoo connection opened the door. What convinced Alexis Vandame was the flexibility of the platform. Asked about the main advantage of EMASPHERE, he names the two together: the integration with the accounting system, and the freedom to build any report he wants.
CanClean has to bring several companies together and handle adjustments that fall outside the standard frame. Alexis Vandame builds and organizes his reports himself, by company and by year, and grows the platform at the pace of his own needs. He can, in particular, view his results excluding all intercompany entries, something he considers exceptional and did not have in his previous tools.
In other tools, he says, you hit a limit either on columns or on rows. With EMASPHERE, that problem does not exist. Everything is doable.
That is also what explains the time saved, and why it could be even greater in larger organizations: for slightly bigger companies, he reckons it saves half a full-time person, because everything is configurable.
The setup ran progressively, about one hour a week with his EMASPHERE consultant. Each session builds a new report, then he takes the time to test it and make it his own: between two sessions, he has a week to play with the tool and absorb the information.
AI in the service of the board
Alexis Vandame already uses AI daily: it is what generated the code behind his Excel files. With EMASPHERE, what changes is the foundation the AI works on. The data of the three companies is centralized, categorized and refreshed every night from Odoo. Connected to EMASPHERE, an AI such as ChatGPT or Claude queries those figures directly, with the same definitions as the reports. Its answers therefore rest on data whose origin he knows.
All the reports are prepared in EMASPHERE, and the verification against the accounting system is done there too. With Claude, a file is then prepared for the board every three months, along with a monthly internal presentation carrying all the indicators needed to run and understand the business.
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