Customer Story
In the past, the consolidated financial statements of the Europlant Group were prepared by an external consultant. Then, the management decided to prepare the consolidated financial statements internally.
From its headquarters in Lüneburg, Germany, EUROPLANT Pflanzenzucht GmbH trades in seed potatoes all around the world. The group has grown since its foundation in 1992 to include 13 subsidiaries and holdings in the key European regions in which such potatoes are grown.
The Consolidation Services and Advisory team from Lucanet put their specialized knowledge at our disposal throughout the process of structuring and creating our consolidated financial statements. They really won us over with their professionalism and their ability to make fast progress toward our objectives. On the whole, working with Lucanet on our first internal attempt at financial consolidation was a huge success.
Grit Bergmann
Manager Finance & Control
The Europlant group previously had its consolidated financial statements prepared by an external consultant. Its executive board then made the decision to handle the process internally. In doing so, one particular challenge lay in analyzing and assessing the previous service provider's approach based on the group's posting history and determining whether anything should be changed.
The Europlant group consists of 13 subsidiaries and holdings, five of which operate in foreign currencies. Some of these companies are fully consolidated, while others are accounted for as associated companies in the group’s consolidated financial statements.
In a project as comprehensive as this, nothing is as important as a uniform approach. The team thus implemented a group chart of accounts. This enabled Europlant to avoid presenting the figures of its different regional accounts at the group level. It also ensured transparency, comparability, and consistency in the group's reporting.
To safeguard the decentralized collection of financial statements and the validation of its intercompany data, Europlant made use of the module Lucanet.Group Report. Individual account statements made it possible to document the transfer of individual accounts to the group chart of accounts in a transparent manner. Europlant's local accountants were then in a position to carry out intercompany reconciliation within the group based on the individual accounts, which resulted in a much lighter workload for the group accounting team.
Meanwhile, the equity elimination for the group's companies was taken care of manually. One key aspect of this process involved tracking how various amounts of goodwill had developed over time. Changes in capital such as distributions of dividends and capital increases in foreign currencies were also taken into account, as were allocations of earnings.
Europlant's team handled the elimination of intercompany debt, income, and expenses with the aid of Lucanet apps based on the corresponding partner information. Since IC reconciliation had already taken place, the differences resulting from consolidation were minimal.