Thursday 23 February, 2012

Financial Driver supports one of the fastest growing brands in the UK

Ted Baker, one of the fastest growing lifestyle brands in the UK has selected Financial Driver to improve distribution, collection, consolidation and management reporting. The system developed by UK accountants helps to simplify the collection of financial data and eradicate the bottle-necks caused by spreadsheets.

Charles Anderson, Ted Baker, Head of Finance, provides the background: “It was becoming increasingly evident that because budgeting and forecasting are top priorities for the business, more flexible planning software was needed to support the level of forecasting required for the next phase of the company’s development. We needed to involve more people in the budgeting and reporting processes and sending Excel spreadsheets to increasing numbers of team members was fraught with problems - people either wouldn’t complete them on time, or would make their own adjustments to the structure or the formulae in the sheets making the data unreliable.”

 
“Consequently my team would spend too much of their valuable, and expensive, time error-checking the sheets and re-inputting or re-pasting figures, when they should be using the figures to produce meaningful and useful reports for the business.”

 
Charles instigated a search for a system that would eradicate the problems associated with distributing, collecting and consolidating individual spreadsheets. His search led him to Financial Driver (www.financialdriver.com); a well rounded modern planning and reporting application that automates the collection of budgets and forecasts without the manual effort. It performs multi-currency consolidations to International Accounting Standards; an important consideration for any company operating on a global scale.

 
Following a stringent evaluation process the decision was made to install Financial Driver in 2011. “Implementation was quick” says Anderson. “We had all our historical and current data imported and we were up-and-running inside two working weeks, which meant our operational downtime was virtually nothing.”

 
One of the key advantages of Financial Driver is that it is a hosted solution with no upfront costs. There is no need for investment in the IT infrastructure and there are no internal support costs.