Abstract
TriFinance, an international finance consultancy, replaced fragmented Excel processes with Board to unify budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation. The shift enabled automation, transparency, and data-driven insights across all management reporting, including the annual report. By streamlining workflows and enhancing accuracy, TriFinance freed its teams to focus on analysis and strategic support, laying the foundation for advanced analytics and future growth through data integration and interactive dashboards.
Why This Story Matters
As professional services organizations grow, finance teams must move faster while maintaining accuracy, transparency, and control. TriFinance’s journey shows how replacing spreadsheet-driven processes with an integrated financial platform can unlock efficiency and insight at scale. By unifying budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and reporting in Board, TriFinance empowered its teams to shift focus from manual tasks to value-added analysis and strategic business partnering.
Key benefits:
- Automated 70% of FP&A processes, significantly reducing manual effort
- Increased time available for analysis by over 80%, enabling greater strategic focus
- Reduced errors by 20% through automation and improved data validation
- Faster budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation cycles
- Improved visibility into key business drivers through driver-based planning
- Greater transparency and consistency across financial processes
- Enhanced decision-making supported by integrated reporting and dashboards
The Company
Founded in 2001 in Belgium, TriFinance is an international consultancy firm specializing in finance, with offices across Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Luxembourg. With more than 800 employees, the company supports leading organizations in areas such as accounting, controlling, and project management. TriFinance places strong emphasis on the professional growth and fulfilment of its people, aligning projects with individual ambitions and fostering a culture of mentoring, coaching, and continuous learning.
The Challenge: From spreadsheets to smarter, faster budgeting
Initially, the primary objective was to enhance the budgeting process to better support the needs of a growing and increasingly complex organization. As TriFinance expanded across multiple countries and business units, existing spreadsheet-based processes became more difficult to manage, limiting efficiency, consistency, and scalability. At the same time, the organization aimed to transition away from Excel where possible, as fragmented files and manual workflows made it harder to ensure data accuracy, maintain transparency, and respond quickly to changing business conditions.
TriFinance was therefore seeking a more integrated approach that could balance flexibility with stronger data governance and security. The goal was not only to accelerate budgeting cycles, but also to reduce reliance on manual work, improve collaboration across teams, and create a more reliable foundation for forecasting and decision-making. Ultimately, they needed a solution that could support faster, more informed responses to change while keeping financial processes aligned and controlled across the organization.
The Solution: Streamlined budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation
TriFinance selected Board to unite budgeting, forecasting, and financial consolidation. Combined with the ability to automate manual tasks, Board was the clear choice to streamline processes and enhance decision-making efficiency.
Board takes the time-consuming verification work off our hands. This shifts my focus from checking data to proactively advising the organization.
Sam Houben
A key success factor in the implementation has been the close collaboration between TriFinance and PlanPulse. Acting as value-adding partners, both teams continuously evaluate every roadmap topic in terms of scope, budget, and division of responsibilities across development and support. Through open discussions and fast issue resolution, the partnership ensures steady progress and high-quality outcomes. TriFinance also emphasizes the importance of strong internal alignment—ensuring business stakeholders work closely with consultants to drive shared understanding and accelerate results.
Enhancing the Budgeting Process
The first step for TriFinance was improving how budgets were created and managed. By moving away from fragmented Excel files to Board, they streamlined and standardized the budgeting process across the organization. This made it easier to collect, validate, and consolidate data, reducing manual effort and errors. As a result, budgeting became faster, more structured, and more reliable, providing a solid financial baseline for the company.
Optimizing Forecasting
Building on this improved budgeting foundation, TriFinance then enhanced its forecasting capabilities. Using Board, they shifted towards a more dynamic and data-driven approach by focusing on revenue and key business drivers such as consultant activity and monthly net growth. Each business unit, known as a Blue Chip Boutique (BCB) or Expert Support Unit (XSU), can now perform driver-based forecasting, making projections more accurate and relevant. From a reporting standpoint, actuals, budgets, and forecasts can be seamlessly compared and visualized, enabling better analysis and helping the organization continuously improve forecast accuracy and understand deviations.
Faster Consolidation
Additionally, the monthly financial consolidation process and annual report are now fully integrated into Board. By automating data loading, intercompany reconciliation, and generating key financial reports such as the P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. As a result, consolidation is now faster, more transparent, and less prone to manual error thanks to automation and workflow controls.
The final step in TriFinance’s Board roadmap to date was the integration of the annual report, with data from Board automatically available in Word via the MS Office Plugin. This enables seamless creation of analyses and commentary for external stakeholders, with any data updates reflected instantly—making reporting more efficient and accurate.
Jeroen Zeeuw
Taking ownership like TriFinance did is essential: make sure you build the knowledge and experience needed to support and further develop it yourself for the best results.
The Benefits: Integrated financial processes driving accuracy, insight, and transparency
At this time, budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, and nearly all management reporting, including the annual report, are managed within a single integrated platform—Board. This unified approach has delivered clear benefits:
- Automated 70% of FP&A processes, significantly reducing manual effort and increasing efficiency
- Reduced errors by 20% through automation and built-in validation checks
- Increased time available for analysis by over 80%, enabling stronger business support
- Deeper insights via automated, driver-based reporting
- Greater transparency across all financial and operational processes
Sam Houben
The great thing is that we can secure more and more processes in a single, centralized place. Board is rapidly becoming the ultimate all-in-one tool within our organization.
Outlook
The next step is to generate deeper insights into key business drivers by developing interactive dashboards in Board to analyze process-related information for both customers and new employees. A vast amount of fragmented data is now collected within a data lake, providing a solid foundation for advanced analysis and reporting.
