GL Wand Turns Reporting Nightmare into a Dream for Agriculture Retail Company

Hinterland Financial Manager Monja van Zyl recognized that the company required a better solution for its reporting requirements. “Quite simply, reporting was a nightmare for the accounting department,” she said. “We have a multitude of branches that are also structured differently, and we are required to report across multiple regions. Getting a clear picture of performance across the division was really difficult, time consuming, and prone to inaccuracy.”

A good deal of manual effort had to go into drawing reports from the company’s SAP enterprise resource planning system. “The process required construction of information in SAP, then exporting it into Excel to create management accounts,” van Zyl said. “There were a lot of formulas that needed to be dealt with, and a variety of budgets and other information copied and pasted from SAP into Excel.”

It was a frustrating process, she explained: “Just comparing previous reports to budgets would take up to a day.”

With GL Wand now installed at Hinterland and operational since 2013, van Zyl said the results are abundantly clear. “Previously, month-end reporting would take up to five days to prepare. Now, it is sorted out in around two days. That’s a fantastic boost to productivity. Not only is GL Wand quick and easy, but we also have far more confidence in the numbers. There is less likelihood of any errors creeping in with this tool, which means our analytics produce reliable results.”