Company overview.
Imagine Education is a fast-growing education organization operating across more than 60 legal entities. With a significant number of acquisitions underway and plans to list publicly, the company requires a high level of financial control, reporting consistency, and the ability to consolidate data quickly across a large and expanding entity structure. The finance team of 15 manages accounting across the full group, making efficiency and standardization a business-critical priority.
Challenge.
Before implementing Business Central with Binary Stream’s Multi-Entity Management (MEM), Imagine Education faced a growing set of challenges as the company scaled. With 60+ entities each operating in isolation, the finance team was carrying a manual workload that was no longer sustainable, and would only get worse with further acquisitions on the horizon.
- Siloed entity management: Each of the 60+ entities had to be opened, managed, and closed individually.
- Manual intercompany entries: Accountants had to navigate into one entity, enter a transaction, close it, open a second entity, and enter the corresponding transaction, with no side-by-side visibility to verify accuracy.
- High risk of data entry errors: Working across separate instances meant mistakes were easy to make and difficult to catch in real time.
- Slow month-end close: Completing month-end across all entities took too long leaving little time for analysis and value-add activities.
- 60 sets of working papers: Reconciliation at month-end required a separate set of working papers for every account item, across every entity.
“We needed a lot more control over our accounts, and much better ability to pull data quickly, consolidate it across the group, and do analysis.” — Mel Youngson, CFO.