Sanlam Investments replaces manual Excel budgeting with real-time IDU consolidation.

Sanlam Investments is one of South Africa's largest asset managers — the investment arm of the Sanlam Group, a leading South African financial services group headquartered in Bellville and listed on multiple stock exchanges. Founded in 1918, Sanlam has grown into a diversified business spanning personal finance, emerging markets, investments, corporate services, and insurance. Sanlam Investments offers a wide range of local and offshore products — from unit trusts and hedge funds to retirement solutions — for individual investors, financial planners, and institutions alike. Since 2014, the division has run its budgeting inside IDU-Concept's Financial Budgeting Module.

The division's budgeting process, however, was entirely manual. Each cost centre submitted its budget separately in Excel, and a single financial manager was left to manually cut and paste every submission into a master file. Each update meant re-collation from scratch — a cycle that bred formula errors and figures that were out of date the moment they landed. With no real-time consolidated view, even minor revisions demanded another round of reconciliation. The finance team spent the bulk of their time validating formulas and rebuilding numbers rather than interrogating them — strategic analysis crowded out by the volume of administrative upkeep.

In 2014, Sanlam Investments deployed IDU-Concept's Financial Budgeting Module, integrated directly with their SAP ERP system. The implementation brought cost centre managers and the finance team into a single, shared environment — one where budgets consolidated in real time, multiple users could enter data simultaneously, and the master view updated without anyone having to stitch it together manually. Automated roll-ups replaced the cut-and-paste cycle, and with intuitive functionality, robust reporting, and SAP integration, data flowed without re-entry or reconciliation. The implementation went smoothly, shaped by close collaboration between IDU and Sanlam's finance team from the outset. What the team had spent in hours on administrative maintenance, they could now direct toward reading the numbers, not rebuilding them. Cost centre heads gained continuous access to accurate, current data — tracking performance against budget across the year rather than waiting on the next collation run.

"Working with Sanlam Investments was about transforming their budgeting from a manual, error‑prone process into a streamlined, strategic tool. Seeing their finance team shift focus from admin to analysis shows the real impact IDU delivers." – Geoff ten Oever, Account Manager, IDU

Four shifts defined the outcome. Manual collation gave way to consolidated budgets available instantly — the time spent on manual collation was substantially recovered. Spreadsheet errors and broken formulas were removed from the process entirely. Collaboration opened up: cost centre managers could enter figures simultaneously, with updates visible to everyone in real time. And strategic visibility improved — cost centre heads could review actuals against budgets at any point in the year, without waiting on a reconciliation run.

"IDU is a robust, user‑friendly and stable platform that we can highly recommend to any company looking to shorten their budget cycles, move away from spreadsheet errors, and gain a better day‑to‑day view of their entire budget." — Gino Schoeman, Financial Manager, Sanlam Investments