The Lean Finance Team Needs a New Close
We met with Rob Wood – CFO, and Tom Flanagan – Controller at Yardnique to talk about their experience with Velixo and how it changed the game for them.
Customer summary
- Company: Yardnique – https://yardnique.com/
- Location: Morrisville, NC, USA
- Industry: Technical services / Landscape Maintenance Services and Design
- ERP System: Sage Intacct
About Yardnique
Yardnique specializes in community landscape design, maintenance, and preservation for property managers, HOA boards, and multifamily and residential developers. Yardnique protects the quality, lifestyle, and environmental standards of the communities they serve. Keep an eye out for their bright orange trucks in communities across the southeastern United States!
Key challenges
- Yardnique went through a large ERP migration to Sage Intacct which took them almost one year but they were left with no acceptable reporting solution for their business.
- Manually exported-to-Excel reports from their previous ERP took them hours of extra effort to format and present the way they wanted. Once they had their reports, they still couldn’t refresh them from Excel. It was a repetitive and highly time-consuming task to prepare reports; and Yardnique couldn’t “export formulas to Excel” from Sage Intacct either.
- Some reports were not achievable in Sage Intacct, such as the highly dynamic or scenario-based reports with data flowing through various parts.
- Rob and Tom were only a team of two responsible for producing all those reports that served 30 users. They sought the services of an outsourcing accounting company to help them deliver the consolidated financial reporting they needed for the 23 branches of their business, as they found it difficult to achieve and time-consuming to produce. However, they would only get their reports back at best in the next 24-48 hours.
In today's world, everybody works in Excel and wants to look at their reports in a certain way for their business. Excel is used to get the format the way you want. You don't need to go to IT and wait for someone to program what you are looking for.
If you want to do reporting in Sage Intacct, it's not going to give you your 23 branches by tab with everything linked. That would have taken me hours to do.
The solution
Simply Velixo!
Within 2 weeks of trialing Velixo after an initial demonstration and with almost no training, Yardnique went from "nothing to everything", they were able to produce and automate the strategic reports the business needed - themselves, without reinventing the wheel
Sage Intacct is a better ERP system, but we were lacking the export of formulas to Excel. With Velixo, it was a plug-and-play experience for our existing reports and it’s instant. It saves 2-3 hours every time I hit the refresh button.
Velixo as a game changer
- Plug-and-Play: Yardnique was able to successfully use Velixo functions in the Excel financial reports their business had used for more than 20 years, they had the foundations and were able keep the same formatting and layouts but also improve their reporting.
- Excel flexibility: Yardnique’s management required well-formatted and flexible financial reports, the same type of strategic and scenario-based reports their business had used. They wanted to use Excel as they feel strongly about it as “the King of the reporting tools”.
- Automation: Once their reports were built, refreshing the data from Excel was significantly faster, no more manual export to Excel from Sage Intacct and no more extra effort reformatting everything were needed. This gave them the “Export formulas to Excel” they wanted.
- Learning Curve: Within two weeks, the Yardnique team were up and running with their Velixo reports. They went “from nothing to everything”. Rob and Tom at Yardnique were power users, they knew Excel and felt like they already knew Velixo!
- Self-Service: Yardnique went from having to rely on an outsourcing company to deal with the complexity, to owning the reports. They were also able to provide the management team with self-service tools like the ability to drilldown to transactions in real-time.
- Not just reporting: Velixo is also used for Control purposes. Yardnique uses the fast-reporting capabilities of Velixo for reconciliation purposes, to ensure that everything ties well together.
- Growing together: The Yardnique business has grown organically but also through acquisitions, and as they continue to add entities and branches, they know that new ones will simply flow through in their reports, or if any, require few extra changes.
Preparing my board management report went from six hours to one hour, and I can probably save an extra 30 minutes with further Velixo automations.
Velixo has drastically changed the life of our CFO, he can refresh reports on the fly, he has always up-to-date access to data and can now see everything he needs to help grow the business.
Favorite features
- Cell-based functions: allowed them to be up-to-speed in two weeks and reused their existing Excel skills as well as their existing financial report layouts.
- Refresh button: because it is as simple as a click of a button to instantly refresh a worksheet, in real-time.
- Save without Velixo Formulas: when you export from Intacct, the spreadsheet does not include any formulas. With Velixo, Yardnique can save files without Velixo formulas and distribute them so non-Velixo users cannot see the “technical” calculations in the worksheets.
- Drilldown: enables Yardnique to analyze detailed transactions from any number, even on calculations.
Growing into functionality
Yardnique realizes there are still functionality in Velixo they are yet to take full advantage of, notably:
- Budget writeback, especially coupled with scenario-based reports.
- Journal entry writeback, to automate Performing complex allocation calculations or importing adjustments to the GL post reconciliation checks, all from within Excel in one click.
The Velixo team is looking forward to catching up with Tom and Rob again and witnessing continued positive outcomes for Yardnique.