Ubora Group Case Study

About Ubora Group

Ubora Group is an industrial, black, female led and owned business with an experienced management group with more than 70 years’ combined experience in shaping successful investment companies across South Africa and Africa, delivering real value and measurable growth.

The key focus of the private equity company is on building sustainable growth through responsible investments and commitment to the communities they work with and support.

The group contains more than 25 companies.

The business case

Ubora Group was using Microsoft excel for monthly financial consolidations and annual statutory reporting, as well as weekly and monthly treasury cash flow forecasting.

Ubora’s consolidations were run on spreadsheets with input from managers across the group of over 25 legal entities. It had become a very difficult task to keep track of multiple versions, reference errors and get the reporting done on time. It had become very frustrating for the finance team and a solution was required to overcome the challenge.

Selecting Quick Consols

When evaluating financial reporting tools a key requirement for Ubora Group was the automation of financial reporting and group consolidations.

The following functional requirements were needed:

- Easy to setup and ease of use,

- Auto elimination of intercompany transactions and balances,

- Auto calculation of NCI,

- Team collaboration and

- The ability to prepare statutory financial statements

- Retention of historical data.

Single source of truth

Quick Consols has an efficient and effective management, statutory and ad hoc financial reporting tool for finance teams. Quick Consols is capable of resolving complex and advanced financial consolidation and reporting requirements and is easy to use, own and maintain.

Having the entire group's financial information in one central cloud based app means one single source of truth for all financial reporting.

User experience and benefits experienced.

We interviewed the Ubora Group Financial Manager, Nicole Vermeulen to get her feedback on her experience with Quick Consols.

Question 1:

How much time are you now saving doing the consolidation using the Quick Consols platform and how does that translate into better business decisions by management?

“In terms of time saved I would estimate about three to five days to get consolidated numbers out. I use Quick Consols for more than just consolidations though so it's saving time in that area as well.

The app has really helped us with our ad hoc reporting, where for example, management or shareholders are looking for specific report scenarios, outside of the standard financial reports, such as rolling 12 month P&Ls or quarerly reports.

The platform has also eliminated a lot of manual work and with that human error, which can’t be quantified.

It's easy to find the information that I need and navigate through all the different reporting options.

The reports can be used for banks, management reporting and auditors, which saves time.

I would not say it changes decision making beyond the fact that management has quality data in the right format to base decisions on.”

Question 2:

What is the overall quality of the reporting since moving onto the platform?

“The quality has improved dramatically since I started using Quick Consols. I like that the team can customize the look and feel of reports to suit individual companies' needs if the standard reports are insufficient.

Question 3:

Which features do you find to be the most useful on the Quick Consols platform?

“The most useful feature is automated eliminating journals, however, the most used by our finance team would be the reporting function.”

Question 4:

What distinguishes Quick Consols from other financial reporting products on the market?

“Quick Consols is has a strong team behind it. Dedicated, helpful, available, eager and knowledgeable. The team is willing to help and make it work for customer-specific needs. Consolidations can get quite technical and the support staff have the expertise and experience to assist with those issues from time to time. Quick Consols is also intuitive and doesn't require massive amounts of training. Exceptionally user friendly.”

About Quick Consols

Quick Consols is a Proudly South African financial reporting tool aimed specifically at complex companies and groups that need to prepare monthly and annual consolidated accounts. Our cloud-based software automates complexities around consolidating and reporting for groups with multiple year ends, currencies and ERP systems with a slice and dice approach to reporting. While retaining the structure, control and validation needed in a financial reporting tool, we’ve managed to provide the flexibility required for our software to work in your business, no matter the size or unique reporting requirements. Use our software for your monthly reporting or annually when preparing your annual consolidated financial statements.

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