Wagners Saves 2 Days on Month-End Close With Planful

Wagners is an ASX-listed Australian construction materials and services company known for its integrated operations across cement, concrete, aggregates, and sustainable building technologies like Earth Friendly Concrete® and Composite Fibre Technologies. With a strong commitment to safety and innovation, Wagners delivers high-performance solutions for projects internationally.

With Planful in place, Wagners has:

• Shortened its month-end close by two full days, with visibility by day three and board reports complete by day four.
• Eliminated manual consolidation across 18 spreadsheets, replacing it with automated, refreshable reporting.
• Standardized budgeting and reporting across all divisions, improving consistency, accuracy, and trust in the numbers.
• Increased leadership confidence in financial data through real-time drill-down and reliable driver-based insights.
• Expanded its forecasting horizon to 18–24 months, enabling more strategic, forward-looking planning.

Wagners operates across 18 business units, across construction materials, project services, and new generation building materials. Each unit managed its financials independently, relying on its own spreadsheets. While this autonomy supports the business, it created major challenges for the corporate finance team.

“With 18 different spreadsheets and reports in different formats, it took a couple of hours twice each month to pull everything together,” recalled Michael Choi, Management Accounting Manager. “Everyone was doing things slightly differently, so it was difficult to understand the variations across reports.”

Intercompany transactions added even more complexity. Because divisions handled internal sales differently, numbers often didn’t match, reports fell out of sync, and confidence in the data suffered. Month-end close routinely stretched to five or six business days.

Wagners’ ERP system also limited deeper analysis. Key operational drivers, such as volumes and average selling price, weren’t easily accessible, forcing the team into manual work.

“We were constantly jumping between Excel and our ERP if we wanted to investigate a number or dig into non-financial key drivers,” said Lachlan Stevenson, Financial and Accounting Manager at Wagners.

Without a consistent process, real-time visibility, or a reliable way to forecast the balance sheet and cash flow statement, Wagner’s finance team struggled to plan ahead. As the business grew, the need for standardized, trustworthy information became urgent.

“We wanted reliable, stable information… and we just didn’t have that before Planful,” Michael said.

Wagners chose Planful because it offered the flexibility they needed to streamline planning and reporting without forcing the finance team to rebuild their ERP or manage an overly complex system.

Planful gave them a clear way to standardize reporting, connect intercompany activity, and unify planning across all 18 business units. It also offered room to scale into more advanced planning over time, all at a price point that made sense.

“We wanted something flexible enough for what we’re trying to do, without building another ERP system,” said Michael.

Wagners partnered with ForPoint, a Planful implementation partner serving Australia and New Zealand, and the project finished on time and on budget, ensuring a smooth, low-risk rollout that set the stage for early success.

• Unified planning and reporting: All 18 divisions budget and forecast directly in Planful using standardized templates, with intercompany updates syncing automatically across business units.
• Automated consolidation: Consolidation is fully automated directly in Planful, giving the team a real-time group view without gathering or merging 18 spreadsheets.
• Instant reporting in Spotlight for Microsoft 365: Teams use Spotlight to pull consolidated Planful data into Excel and refresh board and management reports instantly.
• Real-time drill-down: Users can drill into transactions directly within Planful, making variance analysis and issue resolution faster and more accurate.
• Driver-based budgeting: Key operational drivers—such as volume and average sales price— are now live in Planful, enabling more reliable and consistent variance analysis.
• Balance sheet and cash flow forecasting: Wagners can now budget and forecast the balance sheet and are building a more dependable cash flow forecasting process using Planful.
• Broad adoption across the business: About 30 users across all divisions rely on Planful. Wagners launched the platform at the start of the financial year with no complaints from users.

Planful has transformed how Wagners’ finance team works, reducing manual effort, improving data reliability, and giving leaders confidence in the numbers they rely on every day.

“It used to take us until day five or six to finish the month-end and get the board reports out,” Michael said. “With Planful, we get preliminary numbers by midday on day three, and the board reports out on day four.”

Wagners also eliminated hours of consolidation work each month. Instead of copying and pasting from 18 spreadsheets, divisions now submit standardized budgets and forecasts directly into Planful, and consolidated results update automatically.

With consistent templates, real-time drill-down, and a single source of truth, teams across the business trust the data they’re working with and spend more time analyzing insights instead of reconciling reports.

Reliable, consistent data has allowed Wagners to extend its forecasting horizon, planning 18 to 24 months ahead, rather than just one year at a time, supporting more strategic, long-term planning..

“There’s more confidence in the numbers, which lets us focus on being more strategic,” said Lachlan.

“It all starts when you have reliable, stable information, and Planful gives us that,” added Michael. “Now we can think forward instead of just reporting what happened.”