Planful Helps Bickford’s Group Australia Bring a Consolidated View to a Diverse Set of Businesses

Bickford’s Group is an independently owned collection of companies based in Adelaide, South Australia. Their worldwide businesses span beverages, farms, manufacturing, and retail, which requires FP&A agility to keep up with a wide array of financial needs.

Planful empowered their team to take a connected, collaborative approach to keep their business bubbling.

Increased Accuracy

in Financial Reporting

Consolidated

Single Source of Financial Data Truth

Challenges: Struggling to support growth across a diverse set of businesses

Ashlee-Louise George knows the value of FP&A flexibility. As Project Accountant at Bickford’s Group, Ashlee-Louise and her colleagues support a diverse portfolio of beverage production and distribution, retail businesses, regional operations including vineyards and wineries, distilleries, along with visitor centers and a pomegranate farm.

The diversity leaves finance with a constant influx of different data from different businesses in different formats. It prevents easy comparisons across reports and slows any eventual analysis. “We’ve got retail, operations, manufacturing, sales, distribution, and they all use very industry-specific systems, so we’ve got data in a lot of different places. You could imagine the amount of spreadsheets we used to pull it all together.”

The manual processes added stress during a time of immense company growth, as Bickford’s Group had