Tool
Jedox
e-regio moved its entire planning process – from profit centre and cost centre planning to integrated P&L, cash flow and balance sheet – out of Excel and into Jedox. What used to take six weeks and happened just twice a year is now a monthly routine completed in seven working days. The key wasn’t just the tool: the controlling team was actively involved in building the solution, which meant the knowledge stayed in-house from day one.
85%
Time saved on forecasts, from 6 weeks down to 7 working days
50%
Faster mid-term planning – from 2 months down to 1 month
6×
Higher planning frequency – from twice a year to monthly forecasts
Over 100 companies rely on bdg
The entire planning process ran in Excel. Between 40 and 50 templates were manually pre-populated, sent out to planning owners, and then consolidated in two large master files – with dozens of tabs, VLOOKUP chains, manual formulas and the constant risk of a broken link somewhere.
Collaborative work in those files was barely feasible. Whoever saved last was right. Version conflicts were the norm. And after all that effort, the output was just two planning cycles per year – in an industry where conditions can shift faster than any annual rhythm can track.
“Producing the P&L, and building the cash flow statement and balance sheet on top of it, involved an enormous amount of manual work. That made the entire planning process difficult on a level that had nothing to do with the actual planning.”
— Marco Bärmig, Controlling, e-regio
The goal was a central platform where all stakeholders could work simultaneously: from biogas planning and IT to HR and capital project management. Inputs were to flow directly, without manual steps, into an integrated P&L, cash flow and balance sheet.
Specific automation targets included a depreciation module based on prior-year asset values and planned capex, a loan module, year-to-date/year-to-go logic for cost planning, and a full profit-centre view down to net income. The overarching aim: monthly forecasts in a realistic timeframe.
Work with bdg began with a workshop mapping the entire planning mechanics against the existing Excel structures. What sounds like a disadvantage, having your planning exclusively in Excel, turned out to be useful: the files documented the logic precisely and made requirements visible. Everything was transferred into Jira and the build began.
What followed was less conventional consulting and more close operational collaboration: one member of the controlling team worked on-site with bdg consultants two days a week for six months. Not to receive deliverables, but to build them together. This enabled knowledge transfer at a pace no end-of-project training could match, and created budget headroom through growing in-house capacity.
This was complemented by joint workshop events where up to ten people from the controlling team spent two days building their own dashboards and modules, supported by three bdg staff as needed. People who had never worked in Jedox before left with a working dashboard built on their own data.
The original goal of eliminating Excel entirely was achieved. The only spreadsheets still open in the controlling team: the holiday plan and meeting schedule. Everything else is in the system.
e-regio now runs a forecast every single month, something that simply wasn’t possible before. Seven working days, ending with a balanced balance sheet, a clean cash flow statement and a consistent P&L. Previously, a single forecast took six weeks, so that only happened twice a year.
Mid-term planning was cut from two months to one. With time freed up, the team now has capacity for a ten-year long-term planning cycle, something that would have been unthinkable before.
Behind the numbers sits a more fundamental shift: the controlling team can now focus on what matters. Building business cases, going deep on products, discussing substance with business partners. That sounds obvious, and thanks to Jedox, it now is.
Going live with the Finance Suite wasn’t the end of the project – it was the point where it turned into an ongoing partnership. Already live: customer-level energy planning. Currently in progress: ESG reporting, group consolidation, a heat profit centre with asset and volume planning, and a regulatory module from the grid operator perspective.
What that means in practice: new requirements no longer need to be explained from scratch. The team can assess and prioritise changes themselves, and handle many of them independently. Every follow-on project starts with a head start – because the processes are familiar, the data structures are understood, and the working relationship is established. What used to be a project has become a way of working.
e-regio has been supplying households, businesses and public institutions across 19 towns and municipalities between the Rhine and Eifel regions for decades, around 75,000 with natural gas, over 60,000 with electricity, and approximately 100,000 people with drinking water. The company is actively driving the energy transition, with biogas, renewables, heat solutions and a growing non-commodity business.
Ready to rethink your planning process?
Integrated financial planning connects P&L, cash flow and balance sheet in a single system, so every input automatically updates all three financial statements. Controllers and CFOs get a consistent view of the company’s financial position at all times – without manual consolidation or version conflicts.
With a well-implemented Jedox solution, a monthly forecast can realistically be completed in seven working days. Organisations that previously needed six weeks report time savings of over 80%. The gains come from automated consolidation, pre-populated year-to-date and year-to-go figures, and the elimination of manual Excel reconciliations.
Jedox eignet sich besonders für Unternehmen mit komplexen Planungsstrukturen: mehrere Profit-Center, dezentrale Planungsverantwortliche und Bedarf an einer integrierten Sicht aus GuV, Cashflow und Bilanz. In der Energiewirtschaft kommt hinzu, dass Mengenplanung, Projektgeschäft und regulatorische Anforderungen direkt in die Finanzplanung integriert werden können.
Migrating from Excel to a planning platform works best when existing Excel structures are used as the starting point – they document planning logic and make requirements visible. Success depends on structured requirements capture, stepwise data model build-out, and hands-on knowledge transfer to the controlling team.
In volatile industries like energy, two planning cycles per year are no longer sufficient. Monthly forecasts are now the minimum standard for reliable management control. With an automated planning platform this cadence is achievable without proportionally increasing the workload.
A depreciation module automatically calculates scheduled depreciation based on existing asset values from source systems and planned capex. Controllers no longer need to run depreciation calculations manually – the system feeds them directly into the integrated plan.
With year-to-date/year-to-go logic, planning owners automatically see actual figures already posted for the current year (YTD). The remaining planning period (YTG) is pre-populated based on the latest forecast. Controllers plan on a realistic baseline rather than from scratch.
Jedox supports overhead allocation to profit centres using freely definable keys. Controllers can combine rule-based distribution with manual overrides – useful when operational knowledge suggests a different split than the default key produces.
The most common causes: unclear requirements at the start, overly standardised approaches without adaptation to company specifics, insufficient knowledge transfer to the controlling team, and parallel ERP migrations that shift the data foundation mid-project. An iterative approach with close involvement of future users is essential.
Costs depend on complexity, the number of planning areas, and the level of detail required. A cooperative approach – where the controlling team is actively involved in the build – can significantly reduce project costs while accelerating internal knowledge build-up.
The clothing division alone has hundreds of thousands of SKUs, making inventory management extremely complex. Efficiently managing the flow of goods therefore requires a highly flexible and reliable processes and software. With Board and bdg, Sainsbury found the ideal solution to optimise inventory management.
Good planning is crucial for business success. This is especially true in the fast-food business, where speed of response and quick adaptation to changing consumer trends are essential. As the business grew, so did KFC’s restaurant planning requirements, which meant that the Excel-based planning system was soon unable to keep pace with growth and needed to be replaced with a more powerful solution.
Heritage menswear brand Hawes & Curtis had outgrown their Excel-based planning setup, with stock intake and weekly performance becoming increasingly difficult to track as the business grew. Working with bdg, they implemented a tailored MFP and WSSI solution on Board, giving the team real-time visibility of sales and stock, a structured weekly planning process, and the confidence to build and maintain their own reports going forward.
