Montigny Investments brings multi-entity budgeting under control with IDU

Steve Du Plessis is the Chief Information Officer for Montigny Investments, a group of companies with operations across Eswatini and South Africa and market reach into Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and Europe. The business centres on forestry and sawmilling. With multinationals and multiple entities under the same umbrella, Du Plessis and his CFO had been watching the budgeting process grow increasingly difficult to manage.

The process ran on spreadsheets, and spreadsheets were the problem. They got lost, got modified, and had formulas overwritten by mistake. Submissions from smaller divisions sometimes simply didn’t arrive, and nobody noticed. Du Plessis and his CFO searched for quite a while before landing on IDU.

“We found it very difficult to keep budgeting the way that we were, with spreadsheets that got lost, that got modified. People overwrote formulas by mistake. Sometimes spreadsheets got lost in the works, we expected them in but they didn’t come in, and they weren’t noticed for some of the smaller divisions or departments. It really was a mess.”

Steve Du Plessis, Chief Information Officer, Montigny Investments

From the start, the support from IDU went well above what Du Plessis had expected. The team understood Montigny’s complex group structure and operations quickly, and very soon became part of the team. Their depth of knowledge meant they could advise on the best ways to use what the platform offers. “IDU does what it says on the tin,” says Du Plessis. “We’ve really been impressed and are continually finding new features.”

A partner in success

Margie Whitten, Director at IDU, says: “Montigny came to us with a genuinely complex group structure and we worked to understand it properly from the start. It’s been a great partnership, and seeing them use the platform well beyond what they originally came to us for is exactly what we love to see.”

Budgeting time has come down significantly, and accuracy has improved alongside it. The team can now get the budget completed on time. But the impact has reached further than the budget itself. Having gone through the work of modelling the business for budgeting purposes, Montigny found IDU just as useful for analysing actuals against budget and for distributing operational reports. What had been paper-based reports are now distributed through the platform, and the team is planning to expand this further.

“We bought it for budgeting, but budgeting is not what we really ended up only using it for,” says Du Plessis. “After having gone through all the trouble of modelling our business for the budget, we find it an extraordinarily useful tool for analysing our actuals against those budgets and then just reporting on the actuals.” 

“It has been a real gamechanger for us. It has changed how we do our budgeting and our general reporting significantly. I would recommend it highly to anyone else that’s looking to improve the way they do things.”

Steve Du Plessis, Chief Information Officer, Montigny Investments