Segro (SGRO) a leading property investment and development company providing business space across Europe, has selected ComplyXL to manage and streamline the information and reporting of both financial and property information held in spreadsheets.
Segro which has locations across Europe and assets of £5.1 billion was about to launch a new finance group application so it was vital all data feeds were controlled and approved with a full audit trail. The information, both financial and property included property area, how much was let, how much was vacant and other operational data. With the information being checked manually the time taken was significant and had the potential for errors.
As the spreadsheets were being updated on a daily basis, with no real way to check the spreadsheets or control the changes except manually, it was vital that spreadsheet controls were put in place in a non intrusive way, that could be rolled out easily throughout Europe with minimal disruption.
Rob Healey, Service Delivery Manager for Europe was tasked with finding a solution that would link into the new initiative to analyze the information, both the financial and property details, held in spreadsheets across Europe, to be able to report on the changes all the way to cell level and then to send notifications to the owners of the spreadsheets that the document had changed, all in a fast and verifiable way.
The project was initiated in France with 45 users spread across 9 different countries in Europe. These users included the Finance Accountants, Property Managers and Country Managers with the information feeding into the central store, the changed spreadsheets saved, with their full version then analyzed every day.
"Once ComplyXL was installed, it saved us enormous amounts of time in the analysis of spreadsheet changes. With the property information when it changes it causes a ripple effect, now with the changes being easy to track down and easy to see and approve, we have confidence in the information. For instance in Germany we have 110 properties, so any changes to information in our spreadsheets, we can now easily filter and understand, we know and trust the quality of information" said Rob Healey.
