Futuresense helps Homechoice simplify and automate financial close

As its name implies, JSE-listed retailer Homechoice specialises in providing affordable quality homeware to its customers in South Africa and Mauritius. Offering shoppers a multitude of channels to choose from, Homechoice has made its name for convenience and home delivery of an affordable range of products.

In order to simplify its financial consolidation process, particularly across the different countries it operates in, Homechoice recently decided to invest in a cloud-based solution. The company required a solution that would allow it to meet international reporting requirements as well as enable it to automate the entire process, as its existing solution required manual intervention.

Homechoice decided on Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close (FCC) as the solution best meeting its needs. FCCS offered all of the features the company was looking for, enabling a more efficient and integrated process. The automation of the process also enabled the finance team to save a great deal of time.

FCCS has enabled Homechoice to take advantage of best practice functionality, explains Andreia Achadinha, Enterprise Performance Management Consultant at Futuresense. "Cash flow, balance sheet, income statement, and more are automatically calculated. FCCS can easily accommodate complex legal and management rollups, including unique business calculations and reporting requirements, without the need for complicated scripting, and Homechoice is now able to quickly and easily produce a set of automated consolidated financial results."

She adds that as with any project, there were a few challenges that the Futuresense team had to solve. The small Futuresense team was developing Financial Reports at the same time as the FCCS implementation, but the team's expertise allowed them to find workarounds to fix any issues that they encountered.

"The project has enabled Homechoice to shorten consolidation time and produce financial statements a lot faster with limited manual intervention. The end result was a solution that Homechoice was extremely happy with. Homechoice is satisfied with the Oracle cloud-based solution and plans to implement a second cloud-based solution, Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service, in the near future," says Achadinha.