Faster financial reporting after an acquisition: the Onefield Belgium case

The Belgian group was recently acquired by Proxiserve, a French company active in heating, maintenance, metering and electricity supply.

When Maxime Vandermeersch, CFO at Onefield Belgium, took up his post in 2019, Onefield was managing its financial reporting in Excel. “For me, as a firm believer in SaaS solutions... it was like going back to another world: Excel,” says Maxime.

This return to Excel weighed on the way he and his team worked: “It took a lot of adjusting and checking to track down the small errors.” All the information had to be exported from the accounting software into Excel files, then extracted and reprocessed.

The Excel reports raised another problem. “They were built in such a complex way that every change had major knock-on effects,” Maxime remembers. In practice, every change required manual work: the team always had to “rework the reports after every change to make sure the data was correct.”

This repetitive manual work was tedious and time-consuming, and it left room for errors. Those risks were all the greater because Onefield is a group, so it has to be especially careful with management consolidation (including intercompany reconciliation).

Since EMASPHERE arrived, Maxime has regained his peace of mind: “With EMASPHERE, I don’t have to wonder whether the data has been processed correctly. The solution puts my mind at ease: I no longer ask myself a thousand questions about the reliability of the financial data.”

EMASPHERE works with account ranges, so when a new account is created, it is automatically included in the solution.

EMASPHERE recently proved its worth in detecting stock errors too. With its drill-down feature, the platform gives access to the detail behind the data in one click. Using this feature, Onefield’s teams traced a stock error back to its source, found its cause and corrected it quickly.

“EMASPHERE is increasingly taking the place of an accounting check. We often do our checks based on the data the solution provides,” says Maxime.