Automated reconciliation across 80% of SSC financial operations
About Grupo Veneza
The company Grupo Veneza is a retail company with more than 1,300 employees spread across 11 states in Brazil. The organization operates as a dealer in machinery and equipment for the paving, agricultural, truck, bus and light vehicle sectors.
The company, which started out as a family business, has grown strongly in recent years, and today has its Shared Services Center (SSC) structure certified by the Great Place To Work (GPTW) institution, acting in an increasingly professional manner and with total data security.
Grupo Veneza’s SSC began taking shape in 2019 by consolidating two existing administrative structures in Recife and Natal, in response to the shareholders’ need achieve greater synergy and reduce expenses. Since then, the area has 100 employees, and is responsible for the administration of operation of 59 CNPJs, between headquarters and subsidiaries.
According to Marcello Rocha, Director of Grupo Veneza’s SSC, half of this workforce works exclusively in transactional activities related to finance, such as: accounts payable, accounts receivable, credit analysis, collection, cash flow, accounting, tax, legal, IT and indirect purchasing.
Context
The client's objective when looking for Dattos was to automate, organize and professionalize the financial process across Grupo Veneza’s companies through efficient SSC management. At the start of the operation, there were still many processes being carried out on paper, e-mail and spreadsheets, without clear procedures, standardization or information quality criteria.
With the accelerated growth of companies, the financial reconciliation process has become a major challenge, due to the large volume of manual work, as well as rework and discrepancies in reconciliations.
"We needed governance and quality records, visibility to ensure that everything that happened in the accounts was correct and reflected in the company's accounts. But the reality was that, even with all the efforts and manual spreadsheets in this process, we always had a significant volume of pending items, reconciliations and rework," explains Marcello.
With this need in mind, Grupo Veneza began looking for tools and solutions that could support the team. The first step was to implement a a major transformation in the team's mentality and culture, so that they could better understand the importance of delivering correct data on time.
In parallel with the cultural change, the company also resorted to technological tools that could support the different routines of the CSC, and that's where they found Dattos. Marcello believes that technology is fundamental, and that finance departments that don't update themselves in this regard will be left behind.
"Our motto has become: investing in technology and optimizing routines to scale intelligently, with automated processes and integrated transactions," he emphasizes.
The challenge
The finance teams had accumulated more than 2,600 hours of overtime due to the high volume of manual activities performed under tight deadlines
Despite extensive manual effort, spreadsheets and team capacity, the process still did not achieve the required level of quality and governance
More than 400,000 lines had to be processed manually each month across 148 general ledger accounts associated with 58 legal entities
The solution
Before Dattos, the operation via Excel was the approach chosen by Grupo Veneza to bring reconciliations up to date. However, spreadsheets alone it was not possible to achieve the expected result because the transaction volume was too high.
Our technology is optimized so that it doesn't require the support of an IT structure or programming expertise, implementation became much simpler, which was a decisive factor in Grupo Veneza’s decision to choose Dattos.
Thus, with the automated reconciliation and governance enabled Grupo Veneza’s SSC team to shorten its daily reconciliation cycle to 48 hours, applying the Continuous Accounting strategy in practice.
"Every day, we close the previous period for all the companies. In other words, many people are involved every day in an operation that needs to be standardized and systematized. With Dattos, we've seen a huge gain in productivity and are able to deliver financial data to accounting every two days. We have much more consistency, accuracy, data quality, as well as a leaner, more qualified team," says Marcello.
Today, of the 408,045 bank statement and ERP lines, 336,734 are automatically reconciled with Dattos, corresponding to a percentage of 80% of the SSC’s entire financial operation.
Grupo Veneza’s next steps are to continue advancing its digitalization strategy and seek new solutions that make SSC operations simpler and more scalable with the available technology.
Automated reconciliation of 80% of bank statement and ERP lines
More than 140 accounts reconciled automatically
Elimination of 2,600 accumulated overtime hours in the finance team
"Dattos transformed the quality of life in the finance department. The team recognized the value because they used to have to work extra shifts and overtime to close the accounts on time, and today they work with much more quality and time optimization. Daily life has become more balanced, employees have a better quality of life, and they are happier."
Marcello Rocha
Director of Grupo Veneza’s SSC
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"Dattos transformed the quality of life in the finance department. The team recognized the value because they used to have to work extra shifts and overtime to close the accounts on time, and today they work with much more quality and time optimization. Daily life has become more balanced, employees have a better quality of life, and they are happier."