Euclid Systems Corporation provides specialty Orthokeratology contact lenses for overnight use to correct short sightedness and treat mild astigmatism. The company offers its products globally through eye care professionals and is based in Sterling, Virginia.
Difficulties
Allan Kaplan, CFO of Euclid Systems, found himself in a tight spot. Faced with multicurrency consolidations and an ERP system that did not have a good reporting or consolidation function, he found himself on the search for a system that could do a consolidation rollup easily and would be easily understood. This is where Datarails came in.
We’re a small company…I’ve worked with a number of [systems] and know the complexity that can happen with some of them. I was very pleasantly surprised when I saw Datarails and how it was put together and was so easy to use.
Solution
Allan uses Datarails to report on monthly results and compare them against budgets. As the finance team builds their budgets in spreadsheets, once they’re done it’s easy to load them into the Datarails system. That way, they can keep track of multiple versions and conduct comparisons for later forecasting, something he points out he was previously lacking. “To be able to say this version was the original, this was the forecast, this is the delta, is an easy and a nice functionality within Datarails,” says Allan.
Allan also points out that Datarails is quite easy to understand, and it’s easy to expand into additional dimensions for account rollups. For example, he mentions that Euclid is going through a conversion to IFRS. Allan is able to use Datarails to map the same account under one column in a lookup table to US GAAP and in a different column to an IFRS rollup grouping. He can quickly bridge between the two so he knows how the accounts are rolled up for both presentations.
He also mentions that he enjoys being able to do comparatives on the fly between periods or between actuals vs. budgets, and updating those instantly depending on the period that he’s looking at.
Outcome
Allan happily reports that this is the easiest consolidation tool he’s ever worked with. “I’ve worked with spreadsheet consolidations going on probably 20 years, working multicurrency for over 20 years. I’ve worked on TMI, Cognos, Crystal Reports and FRx just to name a few. Nothing compares to Datarails for simple consolidation and comparative reporting.”
Euclid Systems now enjoys significantly easier consolidation processes. Now, all Allan has to do is load his Trial Balance from each of his entities into Datarails, put in the appropriate FX rates, and voila- he gets out a number he can trust. He then builds check totals in to make sure that he’s picking up on everything. He also finds the drill-down capabilities to be very useful as it allows him to see the base accounts that make up any amount.
“Each month the process of doing the foreign currency conversion and consolidation rollup, and confirming that we have the right periods in all of the various columns that are being presented would take in the neighborhood of a day. Now, it takes maybe an hour to validate and make sure everything is there. It’s simple, elegant and quick, and our team is very happy with it.” – Allan Kaplan, CFO, Euclid Systems
To sum up his experience with Datarails, Allan shares “I was very pleasantly surprised with this tool…I’ve worked with many consolidation tools and had to build many spreadsheets for multi-currency, multi-entity consolidation. The logic that Datarails uses very closely follows the logic I used in my spreadsheet rollups, but without all the lookups, the pivots, maintenance and the chances for errors.”