Cramo is one of Europe’s leading companies specializing in equipment rental services and rental of modular space. Company provides modern rental solutions to construction companies and customers in trade, industrial and public sectors as well as the private customers. Cramo’s 2,600 employees serve over 150,000 customers in fourteen countries. Company has been using Invest for Excel® since 1997.
We were delighted to talk to Kari Kuusisto, Internal Audit Director at Cramo. Mr. Kuusisto started his career at Cramo 11 years ago as a Group Accounting Director, nowadays, he is responsible for internal audit operations.
Why we started to use Invest for Excel®?
“When I started to work in Cramo, I was responsible for impairment calculations. It was the end of the year and we needed to run all sorts of calculations, close books and prepare an annual report. For these purposes, we used services of a well-known consulting agency
Honestly speaking, I was not very happy with the calculations provided by the agency. The deadlines were tight and I needed to figure out what to do! Then I recalled Invest for Excel®. I was familiar with this software and I knew that it was possible to do impairment tests in it – that was a solution! It took me maximum 2 working days to prepare the required calculations. They were approved by the CFO and audit committee and soon became part of our financial figures.”
“Invest for Excel® is a simple tool, that provides transparent and reliable calculations.” – emphasizes Kari and continues:
“Nowadays, I use Invest for Excel to check the feasibility of the investments. It is a very practical tool to understand, whether investment projects are worth pursuing.”
Why Invest for Excel®?
“I think there are 2 important aspects that make this software great:
First of all, Invest for Excel® provides a great functionality – built-in formulas and ready-made layouts that allow you to save time.
What is even more important, Invest for Excel® offers a special approach to financial modelling and investment appraisal.
There is a certain philosophy behind, that can be described as a ‘life cycle thinking’. It helps you to understand your business better, to find the key elements of your business model, to turn them into monetary values and analyze them to find out how sensitive they are to the possible changes.”
“Invest for Excel® is a standardized tool, which makes financial modelling easier” – underlines Kari.
“In real life, when there is always a lack of time and resources, unless there is a reliable ready-made tool, you must spend a lot of time working with plain Excel, which does not really give a business advantage. Invest for Excel® allows to skip that phase and focus on your business, rather than Excel layout.”
Invest for Excel® advantages
“Invest for Excel® has a very intuitive interface. When you open the program, you can see a well-developed structure and working order: investment table, income statement, working capital table etc. You have a clear structure, life cycle phases and key elements of your project right in front of you! Such logical framework has been helping me a lot. You see, the internal audit activity is not only about compliance work. It covers much more, you need to know and understand your business operations and process to be able to develop them and achieve better efficiency. Invest for Excel® is a quite handy tool for these purposes."
"Moreover, this software incorporates best practices in the financial modelling. Which means that even without having a lot of experience in financial modelling, you can be sure that you will produce a professional calculation with the help of Invest for Excel®. However, if you learn the program a little bit more and take a risk of playing with the numbers and various functions - you can get much more insight about the objects of your analysis: investment projects, your business etc.”
Invest for Excel® applications:
“In Invest for Excel®, we can analyze the profitability of various projects in our company. It can be rental of various equipment, modular space or investment in a new machinery. Another effective application of this software is pricing. As soon as you learn how to use the program, you can use it everywhere, generating reliable calculations for more effective decision making. When it comes to me, every time when I have a question or I start wondering about some business process or project I can quickly test it in Invest for Excel®.
You start your work with entering initial data and numbers into Invest for Excel®. Once you have created your financial model, you can play with the numbers and see how sensitive to changes your model is.” - emphasizes Kari.
Is it easy to learn Invest for Excel®?
“I think it is about the same as any type of learning. It is about attitude! If you are open, if you want to learn something new and useful – it is easy to do so!
Of course, there are some classical barriers. E.g. when we talk about financial modelling, we can see that people rely a lot on Excel spreadsheets and own templates. Often, people tend to like and support their own models rather than the newly introduced software.
Even if the new software is great, there is always only one big problem– “It was not developed by me”! – laughs Kari and continues:
"This is ridiculous, but it is quite common truth in many organizations. That’s why I think the attitude is important when we talk about learning.
Despite all possible barriers and efforts, the result is definitely worth it and I would advise Invest for Excel® to anyone who is interested in reliable financial modelling.” – finalizes Kari Kuusisto.
Images are used with permission of CRAMO.
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