Specialty retail
Tallowe & Vane
A retailer with thirty-one store companies reads one consolidated number before the first delivery arrives.
Group
31 entities · 8 banks · 7 currencies
Country
United Kingdom
Backtest
Inside range · error 1.9 %
The setup
Tallowe & Vane sells homewares and gifts through 180 shops and a web store in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, the United States, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. Each market is a separate company, and the group has eight banks, each with its own morning report.
Priya Desai’s finance team used to compile the group position by hand each morning. It was ready at 11:40, which meant the day’s currency purchases were made before the team knew the real position, and the group often bought dollars on one side of the business while selling them on the other.
Backtest · forecast vs actual · 13 weeks
8:12 a.m.
Median time the consolidated position is ready, from 11:40 a.m.
£236,418
Of weekly foreign-exchange cost removed by netting before conversion
21 → 4
Spreadsheets feeding the Monday finance pack
“
Thirty-one companies means thirty-one small mistakes a week. Headroom doesn’t make them disappear, it makes them visible by eight in the morning.
Priya Desai
Group Finance Director
What changed
After connecting its banks and its NetSuite ledger, the consolidated position is ready at 8:12 a.m. The multi-currency matrix shows every entity against every currency, and the netting view shows what the group would need to convert if it offset first. Netting before conversion removed £236,418 of weekly FX cost in the first quarter.
The Monday finance pack was fed by twenty-one spreadsheets; it is now fed by four, and three of those are exports from Headroom. Priya says the saving she values most is attention: the team spends its first hour on exceptions, not on assembling the picture they are meant to be reading.
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