Video: Helping an international business improve its financial reporting

Our client, dopay, is a fast moving, entrepreneurial international group. The ability to take decisions based on up-to-date financial reporting is critical.

Dopay has companies in the UK, Netherlands, Egypt and West Africa. As an international group it needs financial information presented in a consolidated form. This presents the group accounts as if it were a single entity - giving clarity to the overall performance of the group.

Unfortunately, preparing group accounts can be a slow and laborious process. A typical scenario is where subsidiary companies report to the parent company. The local currency of each subsidiary company will depend on its country of origin. It could be Hong Kong Dollars, Russian Rubles, Euros, US Dollars, GB Pounds etc.. Whatever the currency used by the subsidiary it needs to be converted into a reporting currency that is used throughout by the international group. It might be that each subsidiary company is using its own local accounting system - in which case the local accounts may need to be reworked in spreadsheets to fit to one consistent group currency and structure. Any checks, updates and corrections can be time consuming and slow to deal with - especially with multiple time zones.

Large international groups will invest heavily in systems and staff to produce group consolidated accounts. For small growing international groups the options are very limited - especially for anything cost effective. The system needs to be powerful enough to deal with dual currency reporting and consolidation, but cost effective, easy to use and flexible.

We have been using Twinfield since 2006 and over this time have built up considerable knowledge of the system for international groups. We sat down with dopay to look at the needs of the business and together we quickly decided that Twinfield was the best system. It overcomes the dual currency issues and provides the speed and efficiencies of a cloud-based solution.

Once the system was identified we collaborated with dopay to implement the system, train the users and produce group accounts. Using this approach we were able to provide our expertise of Twinfield and international groups very cost effectively. It worked seamlessly, especially, as dopay's approach is extremely well organised and professional.

Now with the data always on-hand we can provide advice and support quickly.

Khaled Abou-Zied, of dopay said, “The results are excellent. We finally have a much better understanding of our business. We can analyse our figures and can quickly identify the areas of growth. We can look at group accounts but also have the ability to immediately drill down to a specific invoice in Ghana if we need to.”

“Goodman Jones not only understood the technology but by tapping into their understanding of international businesses we now have financial reporting that is clear, fast and accurate and sets us up for future growth.”