Alltech Cuts 8 Days From Monthly Close Cycles by Automating Consolidations With Planful

Alltech is on a mission to improve the health and performance of people, animals, and plants through nutrition and scientific innovation. Headquartered outside of Lexington, Kentucky, the company was founded in 1980 and now operates 75 manufacturing facilities to serve customers in more than 100 countries.

Over the past decade, Alltech experienced significant growth, largely fueled by acquisitions that increased overall financial complexity and strained its manual close, consolidation, and financial reporting processes. To regain consistency, accuracy, and control, Alltech chose Planful to streamline, integrate, and automate its global financial performance management efforts.

As Alltech scaled, its finance and accounting teams faced increasing pressures. The company’s 200-plus accountants relied on spreadsheets to manage close and consolidation across more than 140 legal entities and holding structures. Adding to the pain were accounting inconsistencies: Entities used various ERP systems and had unique charts of accounts, local accounting practices, and different reporting requirements.

“It was a nightmare,” recalled May Xu, Alltech’s Deputy CFO, Audit and Reporting. “Just think about the monthly reporting effort, think about currency conversions. We were doing it in Excel for each entity. It was so easy to enter a wrong formula or exchange rate. Or, someone would change a cutoff date or add transactions after the month, which would change the opening balances the next month.”

Closing the books was so time-consuming, averaging 20 business days, that Alltech only completed global consolidations quarterly. With lenders demanding more frequency and transparency, and internal teams seeking faster access to accurate and trusted financials, modernization was urgent.

“Excel just wasn’t working,” May said. “We needed to automate consolidation and reporting.”

Accounting consistency was a priority for Alltech, but automation, ease of use, and flexible integrations were equally critical as May and her team evaluated solutions.

“With so many transactions and reporting entities, intercompany elimination complexities, plus the regulatory requirements for each geographic region, we really focused on standardization, accuracy, and efficiency,” said May. “Planful ticked all of those boxes.”

With dozens of different ERP systems to contend with, May saw Planful’s seamless integrations via thousands of pre-built connectors to ERP and other cloud and on-premises systems as an advantage. The Planful team also impressed May, particularly with their backgrounds in finance and accounting, which is readily apparent in Planful’s intuitive user experience.

“From day one, Planful had a really solid understanding of our day-to-day accounting life and what we need rather than what IT or an engineer might think we need,” May explained. “Planful is so easy to understand. Some of the other solutions we looked at, we just couldn’t imagine introducing those products to 200 or 300 finance, accounting, and business users.”

Since implementing Planful, Alltech has dramatically transformed its financial performance management, speeding up close and consolidation cycles and enabling the instant generation of thousands of reports. Planful helped eliminate manual steps to enhance consistency and accuracy across 140+ global entities throughout Alltech’s worldwide operations.

The team has also automated close and reporting workflows, data transfers, and more, thanks to Planful’s ease of use, seeing measurable outcomes, including:

• Global consolidation frequency increased from quarterly to monthly, with the draft now delivered by working day 7
• Hard close completed by working day 12
• 95% of intercompany eliminations automated
• Thousands of reports are easily generated monthly across 250+ users
• Strengthened controls, auditability, and data security

“The time savings is so meaningful,” May said. “It used to take us 20 working days for global consolidation. Planful enables us to reach the draft global consolidation by working day seven and a hard close by working day 12. That’s across 140 entities. Planful is just amazing for speed and accuracy.”

Now, with nearly 300 Planful users around the world, there’s no need to wait for manual consolidations to trickle up through entities, regions, and divisions. Data flows directly from local ERPs into Planful, with validation checks and automation reducing risk and manual rework.

Planful’s seamless integrations with Alltech’s ERP systems have also strengthened data integrity, audit readiness, and internal controls, making reporting more secure and reliable at scale.

“We no longer worry about accuracy or if a close has been overridden because data is automatically integrated with Planful,” said May. “That strengthens our data security. And, over the past four years, we’ve had no audit adjustments and no concerns about internal controls from the auditor, thanks to Planful. That’s not easy for a business of our size.”

By automating core processes and eliminating inefficiencies, Planful empowers Alltech’s lean finance and accounting teams to support a fast-growing, global business with confidence.

“If we didn’t have Planful, we’d have to double the size of our team,” May concluded. “Our team really loves it.”