Banana Moon Clothing, the leading personalised clothing retailer, based in West Yorkshire, has utilised SAP's Business One ERP system for a number of years. Now, the addition of FastClose — an accounting intelligence system — has enabled both management and accounting teams to produce month-end, and other dynamic reports, in real-time without the need for developer-driven SQL scripts.
SAP is a great ERP system but without good database knowledge it's difficult to get management reports from. We needed something to generate formatted financial accounts, but SAP has no finance specific report generator. We have had to rely heavily on Excel and SQL queries, which were not ideal. Ochiba, our SAP business partner, introduced us to FastClose and we took it on trial to put it through its paces. FastClose was installed easily, and it unlocked all the GL data as soon as it started up.
What I liked were all the online videos that were available. With their help, I quickly built our main P&L which used to take us ages to do, and which now runs in minutes. What's more, once built, it is multi-dimensional which means we can run it for any dimension, or range of dimensions like year, period, accounts, business partner, and so on. From the high-level balances, you can then drill-down to the detail to get at the transactions for analysis and audit purposes.
SAP is unusual as it is a transactional ERP system with no balance tables. This meant that we, at FastClose, had to build consolidated starting positions — which we call templates — that accounts departments can then build their reports from. FastClose has an in-memory database so rolling up transactions in real-time is not an issue for us.
“After the initial success with our management accounts, we asked FastClose if they could help with our sales analysis. Before FastClose, we had to take our web development team off the front office to build SQL reports as the management team here is not technical; it took everyone's eye off the ball. FastClose built templates for Sales Order Processing, and all our user-defined fields were there to use as we are a size, colour, style business so we had to have several additional columns added to the database. I can now build all the reports that I need to analyse sales, and our techies can focus back on building our web presence.”
Ochiba Business Solutions is one of the UK's leading SAP business consultancies. Its CEO, Dave Worsman, explained:
We want to help our customers be self-sufficient as quickly as possible and to concentrate on helping them to get their business processes correct; not billing them every time they need a new report. We were introduced to FastClose by SAP and could see this was the product that not only our customers needed, but one which we needed to build all of our management reports internally.
“FastClose is a must for companies running SAP Business One, and I would encourage anyone that runs SAP to take FastClose up on their offer of a free trial to see how effective it is for themselves.”
Established in 1993, a family company that has grown from a lifestyle craft business to an agile, responsible and visionary personalised clothing supplier operating from a 10,000 sq. ft purpose-built facility in Yorkshire, UK
For over a decade, Ochiba Business Solutions have been creating innovative, industry-specific solutions for our customers with the world’s leading ERP solution, SAP Business One.