Why Thomas Hornberger, part-time CFO, chose Agicap

Since 2009, Thomas Hornberger has been working as a self-employed part-time CFO. His clients are large and medium-sized companies with an annual turnover of 100 million euros or more. He supports them in a wide range of areas: in restructuring, in filling vacancies, in project management and in process optimisation. In order to help his clients gain autonomy with their cash management, Thomas supports them with the implementation and use of Agicap.

Why agile and flexible cash flow planning is becoming increasingly important

"The Coronavirus pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine mean that cash flow assumptions change more quickly" explains Thomas Hornberger, "The resulting challenge is that scenarios need to be set out more swiftly in order to provide top-level management with better information earlier on."

This is precisely where tools such as Excel reach their limits, as gathering data from different sources and entering them into a table is time-consuming and error-prone.

"You need an employee who knows Excel very well, so that data from different sources can be imported quickly and automatically and reconciled with the ERP system," explains Thomas Hornberger. "Otherwise, it is not possible to plan accurately in Excel. And even if you manage to set up such a detailed and always up-to-date schedule in Excel, the question arises: who will continue to maintain it if the employee leaves the company or if changes have to be made while he or she is away?"

Thomas Hornberger on his experience with Agicap: A good addition to an ERP

For all the reasons mentioned, Thomas Hornberger likes to introduce Agicap to his clients for their cash management. "In one of my last jobs as a part-time CFO, I was faced with the following challenges: the CFO expected a high level of plan accuracy - at a very high speed. Requirements that only Agicap could meet:

A huge time saver

Agicap automatically retrieves all income and outstanding amounts from the company's bank accounts and displays them on a dashboard. This means that the cash position is always up-to-date and there is no need to manipulate Excel tables:

Thomas Hornberger continues: "This means that the employee spends considerably less time collecting and preparing data and can concentrate more quickly on interpreting it. Decisions can thus be made much more quickly - and moreover on the basis of well-founded and transparently presented data.

Consolidation of data at group level

If a company has several affiliated companies, Agicap can also be used to consolidate cash flow at group level. "This works even if the different companies use different ERP systems," explains Thomas Hornberger. "This makes Agicap very flexible and allows the creation of cash flow forecasts at both company and group level.

Easy creation of scenarios

What Thomas Hornberger does very often as a part-time CFO is to review and plan different cash flow scenarios in order to be able to make the best decisions for a project or to show the management alternative courses of action. "It is usually very complicated to reproduce different scenarios in ERP treasury tools," he explains. "Agicap offers much more flexibility at this stage.

From the main scenario, he builds different sub-scenarios that are also based on the current data. In this way, he determines when and if an investment makes sense or when a new project can be implemented. In this way, he can present management with a wide range of possibilities, so that those responsible at this level can make decisions more easily.

"I introduce Agicap to my clients because I want to have a quick cash flow plan", Thomas Hornberger summarises. "In my experience, it is well suited to complement an existing ERP system with dynamic cash planning. This makes high-level decisions easier to make and leaves less room for chance, which ultimately contributes to the success of a company.