Financial reporting rethought

I have been working in the PE market for more than 14 years and it was usually one of my first tasks in the invest­ments to set up profes­sio­nal report­ing. In the market, there are either very powerful solu­ti­ons, which are dispro­por­tio­na­tely expen­sive and complex for mid-cap, or smal­ler tools, which are infle­xi­ble and quickly reach their limits for indi­vi­dual requi­re­ments. Ther­e­fore, the stan­dard solu­tion was Excel, but this is known to be very time-consum­ing and error-prone in its crea­tion and maintenance.

With Micro­soft Power BI, howe­ver, a tech­no­logy plat­form has been added in recent years that is very powerful and combi­nes many advan­ta­ges of the previous approa­ches. On this basis and in my last role as CFO of a PE invest­ment, I then deve­lo­ped, toge­ther with my current busi­ness part­ner Hauke Gast­meyer, the report­ing solu­tion that I had always wanted for the requi­re­ments of PE invest­ments. With great success. In the mean­time, more and more inves­tors are using our loyos bi Finan­cial Manage­ment Suite for their investments.

First of all, our USP is the clear focus on the PE mid-cap segment. Both the tool itself and our staff are specia­li­zed in this. In addi­tion, compared to the large solu­ti­ons on the market, the set-up is done very quickly and with mini­mal effort for parti­ci­pa­tion. We usually set up the Finan­cial Manage­ment Suite comple­tely within 2 weeks. The effort on the custo­mer side is less than 2 hours! In addi­tion, our solu­tion can be exten­ded as requi­red. Thus, indi­vi­dual finan­cial reports, e.g. for banks or as a quar­terly report for the inves­tor, can be inte­gra­ted very easily. By the way, we can connect all natio­nal and inter­na­tio­nal accoun­ting systems. In addi­tion, any other data sources can be connec­ted and visua­li­zed in reports. For agen­cies, for exam­ple, we often clearly display the employee hours per project or we obtain the data from the CRM system to map the sales funnel. All in one inter­face and in a budget appro­priate for mid-cap companies.

In mid-cap buy & build models, a large discrepancy usually arises in the finance area between the requi­re­ments arising from the increased comple­xity of the orga­niza­tion on the one hand and the available finan­cial exper­tise on the other. The latter usually consists only of accoun­ting and support from the tax advi­sor. We close this gap with our “Report­ing-as-a-Service” approach.

Our team not only sets up the Finan­cial Manage­ment Suite tech­ni­cally, but also provi­des opera­tio­nal support for content-rela­ted issues that arise as part of a buy & build stra­tegy. Examp­les of this are the right concept for stan­dar­di­zing the chart of accounts, prepa­ring the monthly conso­li­da­tion entries or setting up a meaningful budget. Our goal is to provide the inves­tor with relia­ble reports. We provide tech­ni­cal and content support to the invest­ments to achieve this as effi­ci­ently as possible.

About Martin Sperling

Martin is co-foun­der and mana­ging direc­tor of loyos bi GmbH. Previously, he worked for more than 14 years as CFO, advi­sor or opera­ting part­ner for various private equity inves­tors, inclu­ding Auctus Capi­tal, Ufenau Capi­tal or Caldec Holding. He combi­nes compre­hen­sive tech­no­logy know-how with in-depth exper­tise in finance and control­ling. This makes him, toge­ther with his team, a respec­ted cont­act when it comes to profes­sio­na­li­zing finan­cial struc­tures in medium-sized compa­nies. loyos bi counts many well-known PE inves­tors among its clients, inclu­ding NORD­Hol­ding, Hanno­ver Finanz, Family Trust Inves­tors, Auctus Capi­tal, Genui, Ufenau Capi­tal, Liberta. www.loyos-bi.de