Mi Hub Cuts 3 Days from Monthly Close and Consolidation With Planful

Mi Hub, which provides corporate clothing and uniforms, has entities in the U.S. and U.K. using different ERP systems. That forced its finance and accounting teams to rely on manual close and consolidation. But, the company’s incoming CFO knew it was time for an upgrade. With intuitiveness and cost-effectiveness as its primary goals, Mi Hub selected Planful to speed up its close cycles and free up time for more strategic work.

Mi Hub’s business spans the U.S. and U.K., with each subsidiary maintaining different ERP systems – Microsoft Dynamics 365 in the U.S. and OpenLogistics in the U.K. Those systems captured data in different formats and with different account structures, making for a decidedly slow and manual close and consolidation process.

“The data coming from the ERPs was incomplete, so we had to reconstruct it in Excel,” recalled Mark Hobbs, Head of FP&A at Mi Hub. “I was doing that in a massive Excel spreadsheet. It was all customized, and only I knew how it worked. I was the single point of failure.”

It took Mark a week or more to collect and organize monthly financial data. Only then could he begin building the pack of reports for the company’s board of directors. That took another four to five days, with board packs typically delivered on day 10 of each month, and only if everything went well.

“A number of times, the intercompany balance didn’t net to zero, or we’d have questions about version control, or our balance sheet didn’t balance,” Mark added. “When our new CFO joined, he saw straight away that there was clearly an opportunity for improvement.”

Mark started searching for a more modern solution to Mi Hub’s manual close and consolidation pain. His research led Mi Hub to consider nearly a dozen vendors. But Mi Hub’s key considerations narrowed down the list quickly.

“Some vendors were accounting solutions that weren’t good at reporting while others were reporting solutions trying to do consolidation,” explained Mark. “But, we wouldn’t spend hundreds of thousands on a solution. We just needed really good consolidations, reporting, and forecasting.”

As Mark dug deeper into each vendor and watched product demonstrations, one solution stood out from the crowd.

“I was looking for something slick, something intuitive,” Mark said. “It was Planful’s ease of use, a general layout that was quite simple and not trying to be overly complicated, and it had great flexibility for reporting.”

With Mark’s mind made up, Mi Hub selected Planful and quickly began cutting days from its monthly consolidations.

Mark wasted no time migrating his complex, manual, Excel-based close and consolidation process onto Planful. Now, once the U.S. and U.K. teams finish their postings and upload trial balance data from their legacy ERP systems to Planful.

Mark can deliver a draft of consolidated results by day five and the complete board packs just two days later.

“We’re using Planful Spotlight to populate our board packs in Excel, so all of the reports are pre-built, and I just hit refresh,” Mark added. “Once our CFO reviews everything, I can have the board packs and management reports out by day seven. Planful saves us three days every month!

“Companies that are where we were before Planful shouldn’t assume that moving to a modern platform is too expensive. If you asked any CFO if they’d pay to get results three days earlier, one version of the truth, and a balance sheet that always balances, it’s a no-brainer to move to Planful.”

Planful also gives Mi Hub a single source of truth for its global financial data. When questions arise, or the management team wants answers to specific questions at the category and product levels, recurring versus one-time revenue, or split between new and legacy product lines, they no longer have to generate ad hoc reports in customized spreadsheets. Now, they go to Planful. The team has been so impressed that Mark is already looking at Planful’s solutions for planning, forecasting, budgeting, and more.

“Our CFO is in Planful every day because it has all the historical data, trends, budgets, and it’s our truth,” Mark concluded. “Before Planful, there were too many times when the basics of our financial processes just weren’t working for us. Now, with Planful, we have everything in one place. Everyone can refer to and understand it, and it’s just great.”