Chris Hoyle is Group Financial Controller at N+P Group, an international business specialised in repurposing waste into sustainable resources. The company operates across three core activities: trading waste streams, sorting recyclable materials into high-value commodity streams and processing non-recyclable waste into alternative fuels. With over 500 employees, 45 legal entities and operations in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, the reporting demands are substantial.

The challenge: reporting across a growing, international group

N+P operates multiple business units with dozens of legal entities. Each entity has its own bank accounts, its own transactions and its own reporting requirements. For a finance team, that means pulling data from dozens of sources, consolidating it and producing reports. Manually.

Chris: "We've built our whole control environment on our ERP system and use Exsion to access the data within it quickly and readily. That allows us to build reporting across all our different types of processes, whether it's management reporting, cash flow reporting or our audit cycle."

Management reporting and consolidation

N+P runs two monthly management consolidations and a shareholder consolidation. Data flows directly from Business Central into Excel, where the team has built standardised reports from individual legal entity level all the way up to full group consolidation.

Chris: "As we go through month end, we can refresh these reports to monitor how month end is going, identify potential issues and then report on a business unit and group level."

Revenue, tonnage and margin by contract

N+P's trading division is a distinctive operation. Tonnage data from the operational software flows into Business Central, which means the finance team can combine operational and financial data in the same report through Exsion.

Chris: "We have reports structured by customer and supplier, and we can understand revenue, cost of sales and the margin on each contract. We budget under the same structure, so during month end we can compare to budget very easily and see where the differences are."

Cash flow: from monthly to weekly

Consolidating cash positions across 40 to 50 legal entities, each with their own bank accounts, would be an enormously time-consuming exercise without direct data access. With Exsion, the team does it weekly.

Chris: "Without Exsion, we'd be looking at cash flow once, maybe once a month. In this kind of environment, that's not fast enough. Exsion allows us to do it each week."

The team uses its cash flow reports at multiple levels: for day-to-day cash management, but also to report group liquidity positions to the management team.

Chris: "The beauty of Exsion is having all the data in one place. That allows us to build reports at different levels of the business, whether that's legal entity, business unit or the group."

Bank reconciliation: AI matches, Exsion verifies

Business Central now offers AI functionality for bank reconciliation. Copilot helps auto-match bank transactions to general ledger entries and makes suggestions where standard rules fall short. But auto-matching is not the same as provably correct. That is where Exsion comes in: for GL checks, exception lists and reconciliation reports in Excel.

At N+P, the team currently uses Exsion to download transactional data and perform bank reconciliations directly in Excel. A project is underway to move the full reconciliation process into Business Central, including AI matching for payment runs. Once that is live, the role of Exsion shifts: from building the reconciliation to verifying and reviewing it.

Chris: "The intention is that the management accountants become more of a reviewer rather than a manual doer. We'll use Exsion to build reports off the back of the reconciliation in BC."

That is the direction: AI handles the matching inside Business Central, Exsion provides the reporting layer that lets controllers check, filter and prove that everything adds up.

Everyone in finance uses it

At N+P, the entire finance team works with Exsion Reporting, from the management team right down to the administration teams at individual sites. That is no accident.

Chris: "We don't have to spend any time downloading reports from our 45, 50 legal entities. We just press refresh and the data flows through. That saves us a lot of time. And that for me is the major benefit."

Productive from day one

New team members get access to Exsion from their first day. The team operates a buddy system: an experienced user is paired with the new colleague. Within a few days, people are working independently.

Chris: "The software was already preloaded onto my system. From day one I had access and was able to use it. It's super simple. You're in an environment that everybody already understands because you're just in Excel. Within a couple of sessions, over a couple of days, new people are very quickly up to speed."

No more projects for new reports

When a new report is needed, the team turns to one of its experienced key users. No project plan required, no IT involvement, no weeks of waiting.

Chris: "We get probably 10 to 20 ad hoc queries every month from all parts of the business. If the data is there, we can get it. We don't do big projects to build reports anymore."

N+P is also rolling out team-wide training with Exsion365 in the coming weeks, to enable the broader team to build their own reports independently.

Why Exsion?

Chris has worked at organisations where Exsion was not available. He has even implemented Business Central for a business without adding Exsion, and calls that a big mistake in hindsight.

Chris: "We spent the first six months after implementing 365 essentially downloading reports all the time and compiling them. I'd 100% recommend it. If you're struggling with working in silos, or you're spending a lot of time downloading multiple reports into Excel, compiling them, reformatting them, then fundamentally this will save you hours every week across your team."

 

---

 

N+P Group uses Exsion Reporting with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Want to find out what Exsion can do for your clients? Get in touch for a conversation or start a free 60-day trial.