NB REAL ESTATE LTD DISCOVER A REAL NEED FOR INCA PLANNING

NB Real Estate, a growing real estate consultancy business lending advice and service across all aspects of property ownership, management and occupation, recently invested in the Inca Planning budgeting and forecasting tool.

Having previously used Excel spreadsheets David Barrett, Financial Planning Manager at NB Real Estate, knew that they needed a more robust tool. ‘We used Excel to put together our annual budget and monthly cashflow forecast reports’, he says. ‘If we made changes to one part of the model it would not automatically flow through to other sections so there was a lot of manual intervention’. The financial team also found it difficult to extract information from other sources and to automatically populate Excel with that data. ‘The large scope for Human error when using spreadsheets was another factor’, David comments, ‘With two people using the model, we found it difficult to keep track of changes in Excel. Coordinating amendments and controlling report versions hard work.

NB Real Estate was not in the process of looking for a different system to replace the inaccuracies of Excel but David says, ‘we had reached the conclusion that we had to do something so the timing of Inca’s call to us was perfect.’ The company has been growing steadily and the Excel model had evolved gradually with it, eventually becoming rather unwieldy. NB Real Estate did briefly look at some high level products such as Cognos and Hyperion but felt they were too big and expensive for what the company needed.

David says frankly that cost was a consideration in choosing Inca Planning, but also that he felt NB Real Estate would benefit by choosing Inca. In fact, David says ‘We really liked the look of Inca Planning and it was extremely well presented by the Inca team.’ He goes on; ‘Inca showed a real financial understanding and did not appear as salesmen having a guess at what finance teams need. We were confident that they understood what we were talking about.’ David states that ‘the personalities of the Inca team I met had a lot to do with choosing the software’.

Through implementing Inca Planning, NB Real Estate wants to speed up their monthly processes and to make their model more robust and accurate. In addition David feels the company can get much more out of using Inca than Excel and plans to start using rolling forecasts and budgets. ‘We hope that we can quickly update our Inca model with the latest data’, concludes David, ‘Inca will do a lot of the grunt work for us so we don’t have so many manual processes’.

Training and model scoping begin in early February, and NB Real Estate hope to have a working model in place around March.

‘NB Real Estate state that their business is organised to deliver outstanding client service, and we at Inca also adhere to this principle. With this in mind, I am confident,’ says Chris Kerrison, CEO of Inca Software, ‘that we will deliver everything NB Real Estate expects to ensure a more robust financial reporting system, and much more.’