PeopleIN has been working with Cortell Australia to consolidate financial and non-financial data across one of Australia’s most acquisitive workforce solutions groups, transforming a 12-day month-end into a streamlined 4-day close and freeing finance to act as a genuine partner to the business.

As an ASX-listed group of complete talent solutions, PeopleIN payrolls more than 12,000 people each week and services around 4,000 clients across Australia and New Zealand. Its network spans 13+ specialist brands and 79 legal entities, operating in Education, Trades and Labour, Agriculture and Food Processing, and Professional Services.

But scale and specialisation come with complexity. With three currencies, 2 ERPs, 2 charts of accounts and a finance function still carrying the data legacy of multiple acquisitions, PeopleIN’s Chief Financial Officer, Adam Leake, knew the company needed a smarter way to close its books and make informed decisions. “In the small-cap end of the ASX, you don’t have the budgets the ASX 20 have,” he says. “So, it really is about doing more with not much.”

When Adam joined PeopleIN as CFO, he inherited a finance function that ran on spreadsheets. Excel was used to consolidate actuals, build budgets and store KPI data. Multiple mapping versions of the chart of accounts, inconsistent legal-entity acronyms, and historic spreadsheets that didn’t always reflect updated figures, meant the team couldn’t fully trust its own numbers.

“We had no way to keep historic financial data: lots of spreadsheets, but nothing verifiably correct, and a huge risk of errors,” Adam explains. The result was an elongated month-end at working day 12 (WD12) or beyond, with reporting hard to adjust, leadership visibility limited, and serious financial modelling near impossible.

Adam’s selection criteria reflected the constraints of running finance in a fast-moving small-cap environment. The solution had to store financial and non-financial data over time; support both individual brand views and consolidated group reporting at the click of a button; deliver web-based reporting; come with built-in month-end workflows; couple with Excel for ad hoc modelling; scale up into planning; and govern hierarchies and consolidation mappings.

“As a newly appointed CFO, your first project like this has to be fast, cheap and successful,” Adam says. “We don’t have massive IT groups to develop. We had to do it ourselves, out of the box.”

PeopleIN selected Cortell Australia’s CoreEPM, a pre-built IBM Planning Analytics solution, that delivers integrated financial reporting, consolidation, budgeting, planning and KPI management, designed to fast-track the end to end process without requiring in-house developers and long-term external consulting resources.

“Out of the box had to be the answer,” Adam says. “If something is pre-built and ready to go, it brings the solution to life quickly. We’re not developers; we don’t have those resources on staff.” Partnering with Cortell was a known quantity. PeopleIN is the third organisation Adam has implemented Cortell solutions at, following Suncorp and Fitness and Lifestyle Group.

Implementation took roughly 6 weeks, predominantly delivered by PeopleIN’s internal lead, Brooke, working alongside the Cortell team. PeopleIN’s IT team built SQL data integrations into the Microsoft Dynamics Navision database, while an external partner handled integration with the Salesforce-based Certinia ERP. Cortell and Brooke configured the rest. The cube architecture, hierarchies and mappings are all prebuilt so they just need configuring to our business, testing, and any issues resolved. Single sign-on was established within the cloud platform and the system was rolled out across the finance team with no in-house or external development required.

“If you can use Excel, you can use this,” Adam says of end-user adoption. “The technology change is very simple. The harder piece is change management: getting people on board who built the old, slow way of doing things.”

From WD12 to WD4, and a finance team growing the business
The transformation has been substantial. Month-end has fallen from WD12+ to WD4, with 8 working days reclaimed every cycle. Cash flow is automated. Governance and control over consolidated data have replaced the patchwork of spreadsheets, and leadership, including the CEO, can see the numbers in real time.

“Excel works now, doing complex calcs and analysis, not holding data,” Adam says. “We have real control. We’ve removed the single point of failure. The team is significantly leaner, and engagement has never been higher.”

Benefits

• Month-end reduced from WD12+ to WD4 (8 working days reclaimed each cycle)
• Automated cash flow and consolidated reporting
• Governance and control across financial and non-financial data
• Real-time visibility for leadership, including the CEO
• A leaner, more engaged finance team, with single-point-of-failure risk removed
• A 2-week integration of a newly acquired group, alongside 2 divestments in the same month

Cortell Australia is considered a global FP&A and EPM expert and the largest and most experienced providers of Business Analytics and Business Performance Management solutions in the region. An IBM multi-awarded Platinum partner for the full suite of IBM Business Analytics solutions: IBM Planning Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics and Watson AI.

Pre-built solutions for fast outcomes

Cortell’s CoreEPM is a Game Changer for the Office of Finance. With decades of experience going into the design of CoreEPM is delivering high-impact consolidation, reporting and planning capability without the time, cost or risk of a fully custom build. PeopleIN’s 6-week deployment and WD12-to-WD4 month-end transformation is representative of the outcomes that can be achieved.