BAUHAUS Scandinavia
‘It wasn’t hard to sell them the idea!’ Why this home improvement chain said farewell to DIY financial compliance
With its iconic jingle and promise of everything you need for the garden, workshop and home improvement under one roof, it’s fair to say that BAUHAUS is synonymous with do-it-yourself (DIY), and weekends and holidays spent building things from the ground up.
But when it comes to optimizing its year-end closing and audits, some things can’t be DIY-ed. That’s when they turned to Impero.
Having all our tasks in Impero creates a much clearer overview. This will give us a better understanding on ‘are we ahead?’, ‘are we behind?’, ‘are we where we should be?’ That way we get a better understanding of where to focus.
About BAUHAUS
From a 250m² shop floor in the Mannheim city center in West Germany in 1960, BAUHAUS set out on a mission that was unlike anything Europe had seen at the time: 25,000 hardware products available for self-service.
If a product needed customization or to be cut to size, that was available onsite, eliminating the need for a customer to travel from specialist store to specialist store in search of tools or materials for their project. Better yet, the store had easy parking out the front and a delivery service – everything needed to help the customer get the job done.
Fast forward to today and, while the market for DIY-ers continues to explode worldwide, BAUHAUS has expanded to more than 250 stores and franchises across Europe. It first came to Scandinavia in 1988 and operates in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland.
"We needed to have everything in one place"
With each of the Nordic markets having its own finance department and processes for month and year-end closing and audits, the challenges of visibility hampered the team’s ability to understand where they were in the process, and work efficiently.
As Head of Accounting for Denmark and Iceland Tom Hvidt Mortensen explains, they wanted a better sense of control over the month and year-end closing process.
“At some point in last year’s closing, I was losing control because I didn’t know where we were, and I didn’t know what was missing,” he says.
“There were Excel sheets in different places, and that meant people would input their work but then find it was the wrong file.
“Then I started to think about the auditors, because they have a lot of tasks for us and a lot of things to deliver during a year-end. That’s when we knew we really needed to create a space which had everything in one place.
“Having used Impero at a previous company I was used to having everything we needed for a closing in Impero. Getting something like that at BAUHAUS just made sense.”
"We won't do the same task twice"
Tom says that by implementing Impero, BAUHAUS will have a stronger backbone for key finance activities, including relevant recurring reconciliations.
“Having all our tasks in Impero creates a much clearer overview. This will give us a better understanding on ‘are we ahead?’, ‘are we behind?’, ‘are we where we should be?’ That way we get a better understanding of where to focus,” Tom says.
“It also means we won’t do the same task twice, and we have full transparency.”
"It wasn't hard to sell them on the idea"
When Tom started to introduce his colleagues to Impero’s compliance management platform, he says his experience using it at a previous company helped get buy-in. “Having used Impero for four years, I had a lot of ideas on how we could use it and how it could make us more efficient in the way we worked.”
“We knew the first area to look into and be more efficient is our year-end process, so it wasn’t hard to sell them on the idea.”
"It's so easy to get started in Impero"
With BAUHAUS already up and running ahead of this year’s close, Tom says he is confident Impero will deliver value to the year-end and audit process.
“It’s so easy to get started in Impero. You don’t need much introduction to be able to move around and create controls or perform controls,” Tom says.
“So right away we can send a control and people can perform them. We already know we made the right decision.”
Discover the Impero difference
Want to see more of just how easy it is to get started in Impero, and what better documentation and overview could unlock for your business?
Book a 30-minute discovery call at a time that suits you and see why BAUHAUS trusts Impero to simplify its compliance.
