CUSTOMER CASE STUDY2013–2014

“I would estimate GL Wand saves me something like 10 hours a month compared with standard Oracle reporting.”

Karl Wansbone, Financial Accountant, Trustpower

Trustpower Bypasses Oracle Financial Reporting and Budgeting Gridlocks with GL Wand

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY2013–2014

One of New Zealand’s largest energy and telecommunications providers, Trustpower focuses on providing fl exible services for its growing customer base. The company itself, though, had learned to live with constraints in reporting fi nancial data from its Oracle R12 ERP system. In addition, Trustpower’s budgeting process with Oracle was slower and more error-prone than desired. Now, with Excel-based fi nancial reporting using GL Wand and budget uploading using Budget Wand, turnaround of the required reports and forecasts are faster and more accurate, leaving time for value-added business analysis.

Like many companies, Trustpower had learned to live with the fi nancial reporting limitations of its ERP system. But a 2010 Oracle conference changed all that for the publicly listed provider of electricity, gas and telecommunications services, which sells to the New Zealand and Australian markets.

At the event, Trustpower Financial Accountant Karl Wansbone and his team met with Excel4apps and saw fi rsthand how “With GL Wand,

you can glance through the reports it

generates in Excel and if something doesn’t

look right, you can quickly drill down and

� gure it out.”Karl Wansbone,

Financial Accountant,Trustpower

quickly and effectively the GL Wand solution could address Trustpower’s fi nancial reporting problems by providing real-time access to Oracle general ledger (GL) data.

“We knew our reporting was slow and clunky, but we weren’t actively looking for an alternative,” Wansbone said. “When we saw that we could access live Oracle data from an Excel interface and drill to details with a mouse click, we had to try it for ourselves.” Wansbone and his team took advantage of the free trial for GL Wand, fi nding that its demonstration was an excellent indicator of actual performance.

Excel-Based Tool Delves into Financial DiscrepanciesAn Oracle R12 user since 2009, Trustpower had been using Oracle’s Financial Statement Generator (FSG) for fi nancial reporting. “When we started using Oracle, we basically ran FSG reports, exported them into Excel and tidied up the reports there,” Wansbone said. “We used the FSG for 99% of our reports, and it was fi ne―but really slow.”

Six months later, Trustpower began using Oracle Discoverer for fi nancial report generation, which helped somewhat, but Wansbone and his team found it unsuitable for writing balance and fi nancial statement reports. Frustration prevailed, until Trustpower saw GL Wand in action.

“We got a USB drive with the free trial and example spreadsheets, took it all back to the offi ce and played with it,” Wansbone said. “We decided pretty quickly this was the direction we should go. It didn’t take us long to sign up and convert to using GL Wand. It wasn’t a big effort at all.”

Today, Trustpower’s Finance team uses GL Wand to generate both standard monthly and annual reports, with

GL Wand for Oracle shown

“� e same issues that led us to GL Wand led us to Budget Wand a year later.”Karl Wansbone, Financial Accountant, Trustpower

some ad hoc reporting as well. Wansbone especially appreciates GL Wand’s drilldown feature to get to the root of any discrepancies. “This is how I use GL Wand most often, and I would estimate it saves me around 10 hours a month compared with standard Oracle reporting,” he said.

Drilldown Capability a Powerful DifferentiatorWansbone fi nds GL Wand’s biggest value is the drilldown capability that makes report reconciliation quick and easy—a big change from the slow sleuthing required with FSG reports.

“With GL Wand, you can glance through the reports it generates in an Excel-based interface and if something doesn’t look right, you can quickly drill down and fi gure it out.” He uses the functionality to conduct a round of checks, correct errors and answer his own questions or those he anticipates his managers might ask. “If a manager comes back with any other questions, I use the feature again to provide immediate answers and resolve any other discrepancies.”

Previously, Wansbone would use Oracle’s inquiry screens for the drilldown process. GL Wand is much faster by comparison. “Especially if your report uses a parent GL code, you can double click and it will list out all of the GL codes that make up the balance. You can see which one has the big value in it or whatever you are looking for. Being able to do that with just one click versus what I would have had to do with Oracle or Discoverer is a huge advantage. It would take much longer to isolate the issue.”

In the time he saves looking at data, reconciling issues and answering questions from his managers, Wansbone fi nds he has more time to add value to the business.

“Writing fi nancial reports isn’t the biggest highlight of my week, so I want to do that mandatory task as quickly and effi ciently as I can,” Wansbone describes. “Then, I can spend time working with the rest of the business, adding value, working on specifi c business cases, or sitting on steering committees to contribute to new business strategies. GL Wand gives me the time and the freedom to make this contribution.”

Managers Appreciate Consistency, SimplicityAs a generator of electricity and a retailer of energy and telecommunication services, Trustpower has unique fi nancial reporting demands. “Those are the two main divisions of our business, so it’s a fairly simple organizational structure,” Wansbone said.

Still, emerging electricity generation in Australia adds another level of fi nancial reporting complexity. GL Wand’s support for reporting on international assets brings value by reporting across the AU and NZ general ledgers and across the two currencies—the Australian dollar and the New Zealand dollar.

In addition, dozens of cost centers—from billing to meter reading to residential and business customers, create other challenges to clean, consistent reporting. GL Wand handles them all with ease.

Managers across the organization appreciate it. As soon as Trustpower made the transition to GL Wand, the improvements were noticed. “GL Wand is so fl exible that we can lay out the reports better so they are nicer to look at and easier to read,” Wansbone said. In addition, Oracle FSG’s drilldown capability was diffi cult to use, and managers

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Trustpower has used Oracle V12 since 2009.

The Financial team installed GL Wand in 2010 and Budget Wand in 2011. It realized immediate benefi ts from both solutions.

With approximately 540 full-time equivalent employees, Trustpower has a fi ve-person fi nancial team that uses GL Wand for reporting across business units focused on energy generation and retail energy and telecommunications services.

The Excel4apps tools are helping meet growth strategies for the company in New Zealand and Australia.

The company’s history dates back to Tauranga’s fi rst power station in 1915.

didn’t miss the complexity when Wansbone moved to GL Wand. Though the managers aren’t GL Wand users, they use Discoverer to perform any drilldowns to the transactional level through a link on their cost reports that Wansbone provides. The cost reports are a snapshot of the reports Wansbone generates via GL Wand. It’s a system that is working well and keeps the managers satisfi ed.

Budget Wand Adds Further ValueTrustpower implemented Excel4apps’ Budget Wand solution a year after GL Wand. Budget Wand allows Excel to be used as the front end to the Oracle General Ledger Budgeting functionality. With Budget Wand, Oracle fi nance users can easily meet their important fi nancial budgeting and forecasting needs, all within Excel and requiring minimal setup and support.

“The same issues that led us to GL Wand led us to Budget Wand,” Wansbone said, describing a much more fl uid budget development and reconciliation process than Trustpower has had in the past.

“Budget Wand enables a much smoother adjustment process with fewer errors than the Applications Desktop Integrator (ADI) we had been using with Oracle. We use Budget Wand for an annual budget round, so we create templates using GL Wand to add historic data or prediction data as a starting point. Managers key in what they want for their budget, and we use Budget Wand to roll it all up and post the budget to Oracle. Then, we use GL Wand to produce a consolidated view of that budget.”

As the budget goes through the inevitable negotiation process, Budget Wand makes everyone’s jobs easier. It ensures changes are complete, accurate and up to date. “We can turn budget revisions around much more quickly,” said Wansbone. “No one is sitting there all day waiting for Finance to do its job.”

Installation Fast, Required No IT InvolvementOnce Trustpower made the decision to go with Excel4apps, installation of GL Wand went smoothly and

quickly, and required no involvement from IT. “It sort of installed itself,” Wansbone said.

He and his team converted all their reports to GL Wand as they developed them over the course of a month, so the new technology blended seamlessly into their processes. Learning to use GL Wand presented zero obstacles to the team. “It’s pretty intuitive. We rolled it out to everyone and training wasn’t an issue at all.”

Budget Wand met with the same enthusiastic reception and, like GL Wand, quickly became a dependable part of the company’s fi nancial processes.

Power For The FutureFounded nearly a century ago, Trustpower is no stranger to change. Today, its retail operations are adapting to increased competition and changing consumer behavior. Trustpower now provides bundled telecommunications services and has added reticulated and bottled gas to the energy options it offers its customers. Its Australian business is growing, too, and new ventures in irrigation are being considered.

“The point is that we are changing a lot, meaning the requirements for our reporting will change,” Wansbone said. “No matter how we grow, I certainly imagine GL Wand being part of it as the source for our fi nancial data. The main thing GL Wand does for us is save time. It has expedited a manual process and given us more time to focus on our business, which is extremely valuable to a growing company like ours.”

About TrustpowerA publicly-owned company listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX), Trustpower is one of New Zealand’s largest energy and telecommunications fi rms. Trustpower has more than 220,000 electricity customers and more than 30,000 telecommunications customers in New Zealand. An increasing part of Trustpower’s business is the development and operation of wind farms in Australia. In New Zealand, Trustpower generates more than 99% of the company’s electricity production from hydroelectric schemes and wind farms. One of New Zealand’s largest providers of phone and Internet services on Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB), Trustpower also provides 51,000 telecommunications services to over 30,000 customers. For more information, visit trustpower.co.nz.

didn’t miss the complexity when Wansbone moved to GL Wand. Though the managers aren’t GL Wand users,

quickly, and required no involvement from IT. “It sort of installed itself,” Wansbone said.

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Excel4apps is a best-in-class provider of Excel-based reporting, inquiry, and budget-loading software for Oracle and SAP. Designed for fi nance professionals, its award-winning GL Wand, Reports Wand and Budget Wand products easily and securely deliver real-time ERP data using Microsoft Excel® to save reporting time and effort. Excel4apps serves over 16,000 Oracle and SAP users in 62 countries, with offi ces in Australia, the United States, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and South Africa.

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