Old Mutual scales from 130 budget areas to 800+ cost centres with IDU.

When Old Mutual's Retail Division needed to replace a paper-intensive budget process spanning 130+ cost centres, IDU-Concept went live in 10 days.

Old Mutual was founded in Cape Town in 1845 as South Africa's first mutual life insurance company — built to offer financial security in uncertain times. That founding purpose still runs through the group today. Across four distinct businesses, Old Mutual provides investment, savings, life assurance, asset management, banking and property and personal insurance to customers in Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Since 1999, the group has been listed on the Johannesburg and London stock exchanges, among others.

Across its Retail Division, Old Mutual was managing more than 130 budget areas through a process built almost entirely on Excel spreadsheets and paper. On any given budget cycle, a manager's day looked less like financial analysis and more like formula repair — hunting broken cell references, chasing updated inputs from colleagues, and manually stitching consolidations together before the numbers shifted again. Accuracy was difficult to sustain and accountability harder still to trace, because the moment a spreadsheet left one person's hands it was already at risk of diverging from the next version. As the organisation continued to grow and its cost centre footprint expanded, the weight of that manual effort compounded. What had once been manageable became a structural problem the division could no longer absorb.

In 2001, Old Mutual's Retail Division brought in IDU-Concept's budgeting module to replace what the spreadsheet process had become. The implementation went live in 10 days and immediately streamlined the budgeting process. The web-based architecture meant cost centre managers could work directly in the system without navigating spreadsheet versions or waiting for a consolidation run to complete. Real-time consolidation handled that automatically, giving managers access to relevant figures the moment they were captured rather than hours or days later.

Built-in functionality covered the detail that divisional finance teams actually need: account itemisation, individualised remuneration, and the kind of line-by-line visibility that paper processes simply could not sustain. Non-financial managers could work in it from day one. Accountability — previously difficult to trace across a fragmented spreadsheet landscape — became a structural feature of the process rather than something Finance had to enforce manually. Transparency and accountability were built into the system by design.

Going live in 10 days, the Retail Division moved from a fragmented, error-prone cycle to a budgeting process that was simpler, faster, and less costly. Where 130 budget areas had once strained the limits of what spreadsheets could hold, Old Mutual scaled to 800+ cost centres — simpler, faster, and less costly to run. Real-time consolidation meant managers spent their time reading numbers, not producing them. Non-financial line managers gained genuine visibility into their own budgets — accountability built into the system, not something Finance had to enforce manually.

- Rapid implementation: IDU went live in just 10 days. - Streamlined budgeting: Processes became simpler, faster, and less costly. - Real-time consolidation: Managers gained instant access to relevant figures across 800+ cost centres. - Improved accountability: Transparent reporting empowered line managers and non-finance users alike.

"Partnering with Old Mutual to transform their paper-intensive, spreadsheet-driven process with IDU was a milestone. The speed of implementation — just 10 days — and the scale across hundreds of cost centres demonstrates how quickly IDU delivers efficiency, transparency, and real impact." – Kevin Phillips, CEO, IDU

"It is brilliant in this niche space, catering for all budgeting and forecasting needs a company may have. IDU keeps things simple and easy to use. It has been a very good experience, and quick to learn its unique features and capabilities."

— Sivegan Naidoo, Operations Manager, Old Mutual