Specsavers Increases Visibility and Control Over Reconciliation and Financial Close Processes
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The Business Drivers to Automate
Specsavers is a leading optical and audiology retailer with over 2,500 healthcare businesses across 11 countries, caring for over 40 million patients and customers. At the time they began looking at financial close automation solutions, Specsavers had been struggling with a highly manual spreadsheet-dependent process for its reconciliation and financial close processes. With multiple systems, different ways of working across the teams, and disparate processes among business units, the team was spending too much time and energy trying to ensure the accuracy of the numbers they were reporting. “We have a multi-site finance function where each location was conducting their own processes and there was an overall lack of standardization,” said Simon Ward, Finance Solutions Lead, Finance Operations at Specsavers. “We had several large Excel workbooks running a significant volume of data.”
Why Cadency by Trintech?
Specsavers was on a mission to find a technology partner that understood their overall finance strategy and could provide a solution that would allow them to gain greater visibility and control over the reconciliation and financial close process. “Because we have such a high volume of transactions, we knew technology was key in helping automate the tedious, manual tasks to refocus our teams’ time and effort on more value-added initiatives for a better employee experience,” continued Ward.
Specsavers was also looking for a solution that was highly configurable and able to scale with their company as they continued to grow. “Ultimately, we felt Trintech was an innovative company that could keep up with the trends and provide us with a solution that could not only meet our needs today but also into the future,” said Ward.
A Seamless Implementation
Specsavers achieved a successful implementation of Cadency and attributes the seamless roll-out to a few factors. “Trintech has a very knowledgeable Professional Services organization that guided us through the implementation and worked very closely with our team to ensure we were getting the most out of the solution,” said Ward. From a change management perspective, Specsavers ensured they had the right processes in place to ensure the team was well equipped to make the change from an excel-based process to an automated solution.
As of June 2022, Cadency has been rolled out across 247 companies and will continue to be rolled out across all areas in the UK/ROI and then onwards globally to their Northern Europe, Australian and New Zealand companies. “Cadency is the solution we have chosen to roll out globally and we are looking forward to achieving a single, standardized approach to balance sheet management on a global scale,” continued Ward.
By automating our controls, it enables us to prevent errors, gives us confidence over our reporting and that our processes are operating as efficiently as possible.
The Cadency Solution in Action
Since the launch of the solution, reconciliations have required less manual effort thanks to increased automation and the application of a risk-based strategy. In addition, the use of a centralized global solution has provided greater insight into the total number of reconciliations performed as well as their timeliness and accuracy. “We now have full visibility into our open items and key metrics which has reduced our risk significantly,” continued Ward. Today, Specsavers is running 115,000 reconciliations through Cadency monthly. “We have automated about 90% of those reconciliations which has saved us a significant amount of time each month,” said Ward.
From a reporting perspective, Specsavers’ leadership team now has full visibility into a reporting dashboard that allows them to drill-down into any account and identify risk on the balance sheet.
Automation is an integral part of Specsavers ongoing strategy to become a world-class finance function. “Because we have such a high company volume and high chart of accounts with a low FTE level, we have to lean into as much automation as possible,” concluded Ward. Looking ahead, Specsavers will continue to maximize its usage of Cadency by leveraging the Journal Entry and Close Management functionality to gain further efficiencies across their financial close process.
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