Stout developed a month-end financial reporting model for a middle-market concrete grinding and polishing equipment manufacturer (the “Company”).

The Company entered into a strategic transaction in the midst of 2022 to acquire a major player within its industry to offer a more comprehensive and robust portfolio of products and to serve a wider range of global customers. Through the acquisition, the Company inherited seven legal entities across multiple continents, each utilizing separate enterprise resource planning systems and unique financial reporting processes and considerations.

Most of the Company’s month-end reporting process was managed by one person. The process was highly manual, creating inefficiencies due to the lack of cohesiveness across all the legal entities. This manual process created several bottlenecks and prevented the Company from preparing timely reporting.

The Company engaged Stout to develop a month-end financial reporting solution to automate the process and create timely and consistent reporting. Doing so would also allow the Company to focus and spend more time analyzing its results versus vetting and reviewing the consolidation process. As agreed upon during the initial project-scoping session held with the Company’s CFO and Global Controller, the model consolidated all legal entity trial balances, handled FX conversions from three different local currencies to USD, and aligned all entities to U.S. GAAP. Stout leveraged a standardized account mapping system, resulting in the ability to provide key financial reporting statements, cash flows, metrics, and dashboards at an entity, regional, and company level.

After Stout created and tested the working-production models by comparing the outputs with prior period results with management, a detailed workshop was held with the Company’s regional financial reporting teams to showcase the solution, obtain feedback, and align on the go-forward month-end process and timeline. Upon sign-off of the financial reporting models, Stout continued to support the Company through a cycle of shadowing (i.e., the Company performed its month-end reporting process both with its legacy approach and with our solution) and hypercare (i.e., the Company performed its month-end reporting solely using our solution with Stout oversight).

As a result of the work conducted by Stout, the Company can now produce key month-end financial reporting statements in an accelerated timeline and generate valuable insights on key account drivers and monthly trends. In addition, the reporting solution was developed with strategic intent to account for any future acquisitions into the financial reporting landscape with ease.