Completed ERP projects

Epicor Software Deutschland GmbH

Castle Pines Capital Uses Epicor XL Connect for all of their Financial Reporting Needs

Customers

Castle Pines Capital

Completion

01.02.2004

Country

Germany

Branch

• Logistic service provider industry

Description

Task description

Founded in 2004, Castle Pines Capital (CPC) is a privately held company that provides innovative, worldwide channel financing solutions to resellers in the technology industry. In the “triangular” relationship between a vendor, CPC and a reseller, CPC acts as the glue and the momentum. CPC helps the vendor-reseller sales relationship stick and facilitates the sales cycle, providing liquidity to resellers in an effort to increase sales volume for both the reseller and the vendor. Unlike those of highly structured corporate lenders, CPC’s model allows for versatile solutions that ensure liquidity for resellers, effectively increasing and extending the ability to augment sales.

The Challenge

CPC’s finance department is responsible for preparing financial reports both internally for management, and to their shareholders and lenders. However, building reports with CPC’s traditional financial reporting solution was cumbersome– formatting was inflexible and workarounds were necessary in order to customize a report which fit a specific need. CPC needed a modern, flexible financial reporting platform to manage and distribute accurate and timely financial statements with ease.

The Solution

CPC uses Epicor XL Connect exclusively for all of their financial reporting needs. Epicor XL Connect is a business reporting and analytics solution that provides real-time, secured access to essential business data from Microsoft® Office Excel®. Epicor XL Connect is directly integrated with CPC’s Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution and acts as a live data link that allows for instantaneous authoring and real-time results.

“Epicor XL Connect works as advertised,” said Armand Brunelle, senior vice president of technology for CPC. “Epicor XL Connect is easy to install, and since Excel is already used by everyone in the organization, it doesn’t require a lot of IT support. With embedded Excel functions, Epicor XL Connect is highly intuitive to users to get in there and begin writing reports. Immediate comfort using the solution helped to facilitate greater adoption and opened up the ability for more users in the finance department to utilize the solution, which is something we didn’t have with our previous solution. We could immediately see the long-term benefits of using Epicor XL Connect.”

The Benefits

With Epicor XL Connect, CPC is creating more reports needed by their constituents, and building them has never been easier or faster. Preparing and updating monthly reporting packages, for example, is now effortless. Using Epicor XL Connect, CPC creates monthly dashboards of their financials that link to income statements, balance sheets, and more.
With direct access to CPC’s ERP data, the information is easy to refresh so users only have to make a few simple selections and Epicor XL Connect calculates and summarizes the rest in an Excel spreadsheet, reducing errors and minimizing the amount of time spent on updating reports month after month.

“Epicor XL Connect is a great tool. The ability to build new reports and create different variations has been amazing,” said Laurie Stanco, director of finance for CPC. “Senior management and shareholders love our new reporting and have commented on how easy it is to navigate around information. The level of detail and the amount of information we are now able to gather and present is ten times better with Epicor XL Connect, and doesn’t require any manipulation to the system.”

Gone are the days of recreating reports due to difficulties with formatting. Using its previous solution, CPC had to build reports in the background and then run the reports to see how they come out only to find out that columns were not properly formatted. Epicor XL Connect has flexible real-time data access so CPC can see the changes they are making to a report while they are making them. “With Epicor XL Connect we are able to see exactly what we are doing and how we are building our reports in real-time,” added Stanco. “Additional changes or customizations can be made on-the-spot so we don’t have to recreate reports after the fact.”

CPC has greatly enhanced the look and feel of their financial statements too by using Epicor XL Connect’s robust reporting and analysis tools to gather and arrange data. Multiple sheet formatting and formulas have further contributed to CPC’s ability to communicate more information to management and stakeholders in a layout that is consistent and easy to understand.