Two weeks after month end
Five Thirty runs eight brands and around 125 outlets on Business Central, with brand and outlet carried as dimensions on each posting. Every month the finance team exported the general ledger entries to Excel, pivoted them by those dimensions, built a P&L for each brand and each outlet by hand, and checked the totals back to the trial balance. The pack landed about two weeks after month end. A brand head who wanted a different cut waited for the next rebuild, and getting the right pages to around 125 outlets was a job in itself.
What changed
Lens keeps a read-only copy of the ledger that refreshes every day and whenever someone asks. The income statement, balance sheet and cash flow are drawn from it, and one set of filters re-cuts every statement by brand, location or outlet for any period.
- Any period from a single month to a custom range, against the prior period or the same period last year
- Filter by brand, by location or by a single outlet
- Income statement, balance sheet and top-selling items under the same filters
- Side-by-side comparison with last year, with export to Excel from any view
What it did for the finance team
The statements are ready two days after month end, not two weeks. Most of those two days go on what the statements surface: a posting against the wrong outlet, a balance that does not reconcile, each fixed in Business Central and gone from the next sync. That is why the close gets shorter.
Finance now grants each person specific reports, brands, locations and outlets, and nobody builds a separate report for any of them. A regional manager sees the outlets in that region, a brand head sees one brand, finance sees the whole group.
- Grant access by report and by feature
- Scope by brand, one or several or all, then by location and individual outlet
- Set by role, changed by finance without a ticket
Root cause in minutes, not a week
One month gross margin fell three points. Finance narrowed it to one location, ranked its outlets, and opened the cost lines: packaging up 18%. In Excel the same hunt had taken a week.
- Open any brand to its full income statement
- Rank outlets to find the one moving the number
- Follow margin and cost lines down to a single outlet
- Check each brand and outlet balance against the ledger
What a Business Central finance team can take from this
Business Central records the ledger. The view across a group is something a person builds from it, by hand, each time it is needed, and the fix is not a faster rebuild but a view that is never rebuilt. Once the statements exist the morning after month end, the errors they contain are found on day one, when each is one entry to correct, rather than in a spreadsheet two weeks later.
The second thing is access. When grants follow the same hierarchy as the statements, brand, location, outlet, the monthly job of sending the numbers out disappears with the rebuild.
Questions this case study answers
- How did Five Thirty get from two weeks to two days?
- The two weeks went on exporting the ledger from Business Central and rebuilding each brand and outlet view in Excel by hand. Lens reads a copy of the ledger that refreshes daily and on demand, so the statements exist the morning after month end. The two days go on fixing what they surface.
- Does Lens replace Business Central, or write to it?
- Neither. Business Central stays the system of record. Lens reads it through a read-only connection and never writes back; corrections are made in Business Central and appear in Lens at the next sync.
- What does live mean here?
- Synced from Business Central every day and whenever someone asks, instead of rebuilt in Excel at month end. Every statement carries the time of its last sync.
The same group's invoices, coded without manual entry
Xtract was the other half of the engagement.
Read the Xtract case study →