Digital Workforce harmonized their finance system and partner landscape
Digital Workforce is one of the leading Business Process Automation (BPA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) service providers globally, both in terms of revenue and head count. The company provides services across a range of industries and today over 250 large global customers use Digital Workforce’s services.
The company was founded in Finland in 2015, and business was expanded to Sweden already next year. The growth did not stop there: more new expansions followed and the company was also listed in 2021. Even though Digital Workforce makes international growth look easy, it’s not. There are a lot things to be figured out on the background.
Rapid growth can result in scattered system landscape
Digital Workforce’s CFO Heini Kautonen states that one their challenges in internationalization was a scattered system landscape.
“We've had nine different expense claim, purchase invoice and bookkeeping systems all around the world and different service providers handling them. So, the jungle was quite wild and coordinating it was hard, causing long delays in reporting,” Kautonen says.
To help international expansion, it might feel natural to start building up a partner network. But in practice, it means that you have a lot of coordinating, guiding, calling, chatting and instructing to do. And as your company grows, this won’t get any easier.
“We used to go into a new country and select a service provider with common local finance tools. By doing this multiple times, we gathered quite an extensive list of different systems. Each country had their own bookkeeping, travel expense systems and invoice approval systems. It was quite a handful to manage, not only because of the systems but also due to the scale of the finance processes that our team did manually. We had already done extensive development for example in our CRM tools and now it was the correct time to start modernizing the finance tools and processes,” Kautonen thinks back.
So, investing in many partnerships is not always the most efficient way to grow internationally. Luckily, Digital Workforce found an option.
Getting financial services to all operating countries requires only “one stop”
Staria’s Global Accounting and Payroll Services are delivered in one-stop model, which means that Staria’s customers get one dedicated service team that will take care of all accounting processes for all customer’s countries. The service is available already in over 40 countries and if a customer is expanding to a country outside of this list – Staria will follow. It’s part of the service promise.
In Digital Workforce’s case, Kautonen and her team has only one contact point to stay on top of the finances in all their countries: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Germany, UK, Ireland and USA. And if they decide to expand somewhere else, Digital Workforce can rely on the fact that their financial services will scale with them.
"For us to be able to communicate with only one team, and having an integrated system instead of nearly ten, saves us days of time per month to focus on more value creating tasks than sending e-mails and Excel-files back and forth. This also creates more sensible working roles for the team”.
Founded
2015
Business
Business Process Automation (BPA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) services
Service solutions
Global Accounting and payroll services, NetSuite ERP, FlowAP SuiteApp
Webpage
digitalworkforce.com
"For us to be able to communicate with only one team, and having an integrated system instead of nearly ten, saves us days of time per month to focus on more value creating tasks than sending e-mails and Excel-files back and forth. This also creates more sensible working roles for the team”.
Heini Kautonen, CFO, Digital Workforce
Global Accounting Services are not only centralized to one service team, but also to one system: NetSuite. All accounting basic processes are handled in it, as well as group consolidation, company and group level reporting, IFRS, local GAAP and multi-booking. This enables cutting down the jungle of scattered systems.
“It looks like that NetSuite will be the financial system for all our entities. In few cases, it was more efficient to keep some of the local solutions (e.g. Visma Severa as a PSA Platform), and integrate them into NetSuite, but all in all NetSuite will be the core of our financial system landscape,” Kautonen states.
Some countries are easier to expand to than others. With challenging countries, carefully chosen service partners and technologies come to the rescue.
“Poland has its peculiarities regarding local external reporting and governmental issues, but the Polish extension in NetSuite has proven to be worthy so we've tackled all the difficulties there,” Kautonen shares.
Selecting the partner and making the investment decision
"The main drivers for Digital Workforce to re-think the financial processes and systems were to get monthly financial reporting done in a reasonable timeframe, have better visibility throughout the company’s financials, have sustainable reporting possibilities in the future and to save recurring monthly costs for financial operations”, Kautonen says.
After starting to reorganize financial operations and deciding to have a new system, how did Digital Workforce select the partner?
“One of the main criteria was to make our work and processes efficient and sensible. Of course, coherent system played a huge role in it, and we wanted to be able to see all the entities in one platform. What really separated Staria from others was the service model, where you have this one contact point, your own centralized team. It’s much more sensible than having multiple service providers in the countries,” Kautonen says.
And what kind of things influenced the investment decision at Digital Workforce?
“The first thing of course was the return on investment, we did quite extensive calculations on that. In addition to ROI, the project schedule was really important for us as a listed company. We also thought quite extensively about how the processes, roles and responsibilities will be in the future,” Kautonen sums.
Also, it’s not all about heavy numbers.
“One of the most important things, in addition to cost reductions, was that we could provide more exciting job opportunities. This played a role in the decision making as well,” Kautonen concludes.
Hear more about Digital Workforce's story, Global Accounting services and growth supporting technologies – download webinar recording:
