Ecophyse: Identifying Cash Gains with KPMG’s Expert Implementation and Training in Agicap
Patrick Doucet, General Manager of Ecophyse, searched for a reliable and expert solution to the cash flow challenges of his waste recovery company, especially the management of its cash surpluses to anticipate peaks and valleys in the cash flow. He found the solution by having Kimberley Aviles, ESC Cash Management Consultant at KPMG, introduce his team to Agicap.
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Key takeaways
Ecophyse trades and consults on issues related to waste production to revalue these materials into raw materials for industrialists. For the company, cash management has always been an important issue, mostly in the trading activity, which makes up about 90% of their business.
Patrick Doucet, General Manager at Ecophyse, reached out to KPMG to implement a cash flow management solution which would not only be stable and reliable, but also offer insights into how to leverage surplus cash for a more balanced and foreseeable cash flow forecasting.
The tool should be able to address the cash flow challenges caused by very regular price renewals depending on supply and demand in trading.
Enter Kimberley Aviles, a treasury consultant at KPMG. One of her skills is giving expert advice during the implementation and training of Agicap. Her guidance helped Ecophyse to quickly get up-to-speed, solve some cash flow issues and identify improvements in cash performance.
" We previously managed our cash flow by connecting to different portals of our banks and then centralised and consolidated everything through an Excel file manually. Thanks to Agicap we are now able to centralise and unify the flows automatically and thus arrive at a truly centralised management and arbitration of our cash flow. "
$32+ million
in annual revenue
9
employees
1 week
of KPMG on-site implementation
Customer’s history
Magali Frontero founded Ecophyse in 2006 in Indre-et-Loire. The company specialised in recycling waste that was previously destined for landfilling or incineration. Ecophyse aimed to align waste recovery organisations with industrialists capable of transforming the waste into usable materials. The company had great success with the creation of the HappyLoop brand based on the observation that it is necessary to facilitate and make waste sorting fun for consumers, who are all waste producers. Happyloop markets sorting solutions and supports and advises communities or companies on the act of waste sorting.
The main cash management challenges for Ecophyse were the consolidation of all their bank accounts in a single, actionable view in order to manage both daily operations between supplier and customer payments, but also customer accounts in the medium to long term. The goal for Ecophyse’s General Manager Patrick Doucet was to have a reliable cash flow forecast that would provide the kind of sustainability a solution like Excel lacked. This is when they found Agicap.
In order to ensure a quick and secure deployment of the Agicap solution, they called upon the consultants at KPMG for assistance. Thanks to the rich experience of KPMG consultant Kimberley Aviles, who already implemented Agicap for several clients, the project was achieved within a week.
" The collaboration with Kimberley in the handling of our cash flow allowed us to implement dashboards, rethink our way of approaching cash flow forecasting with a new methodology and the use of the Agicap tool, which really allowed us to completely revise our forecasts and our way of doing things. "
Customer’s needs
Consolidate all bank accounts on one dashboard for decision-making.
Build a strong, reliable cash forecast a small finance team can rely on.
Identify cash surplus for strategic investments to grow the company.
Manage the cash flows between supplier and customer payments.
Solution
For Patrick Doucet, the collaboration with Kimberley Aviles from KPMG was very smooth. Starting from preparatory meetings for the implementation of the Agicap tool and then moving on to a week of on-site guidance by the consultant to carry out the configuration, discuss personalised solutions with the Ecophyse team, implement the required dashboards and train the finance team in its use, the whole process was to his liking. During this time they even identified additional benefits, such as also implementing Agicap’s credit card expense module to facilitate Ecophyse’s daily management of expense reports and subscriptions.
For Kimberley Aviles, the preparatory meetings were key to set up Agicap so quickly at Ecophyse. Together with Patrick Doucet, she was able to define the right budget categories for receipts and disbursements. As well as set up the cash flow forecast, automate customer reminders, and securely pay Ecophyse’s suppliers. With Agicap, they were able to have a finer follow-up of the overall outstanding amount and the average payment time of customers. The consultant explains, “With Patrick, we integrated accounting and banking data and also set up EBX contracts. From there, we were able to implement the various Agicap modules: short, medium, and long-term cash flow management, automation of customer reminders, and supplier payments.”
The biggest win in the implementation of Agicap with the help of KPMG at Ecophyse came with the deployment of the significant cash surpluses Ecophyse generates. The company’s investment strategy was overhauled with the help of Agicap’s more accurate analysis of the available excess cash at any given time.
Conclusion
Agicap is the perfect cash flow management solution for companies which need to consolidate all their banking data and various cash flows for decision-making.
The software offers many additional modules to automate customer reminders, handle supplier payments, oversee company spending beyond the ability for short, medium, and long-term cash flow management.
Experienced Consultants like KPMG’s Kimberley Aviles can be of great help to set up the solution quickly and securely and train the finance team on how to use it to its fullest potential.
Hornberger Consulting
Business Sector:
Business services
Where:
Hamburg, Germany
Cashflow Problem:
Anticipate cash flow shortages beforehand, craft scenarios that are based on actual financial data, extend ERP-systems with cash flow management capabilities
M2A Media
Business Sector:
Media Agency
Where:
London, United Kingdom
Cashflow Problem:
Manage multiple entities during internalization, managing different currencies and different banking providers
“Agicap provides the view the board needs if it is going to make strategic decisions.”
Business Sector:
Software Development
Where:
Dublin, Ireland
Cashflow Problem:
High manual effort in consolidating the cash flow data of 8 companies and 15 bank accounts, high susceptibility to errors, outdated data and hardly any chance to provide management with reliable reports for strategic decisions.
