IDU creates transparency and ownership throughout the budgeting process at GPI Slots
GPI Slots is a division of Sun International, a company listed on the JSE Limited with investments and operations in the South African gaming and leisure industry.
GPI Slots found their existing budgeting process to be cumbersome, time-consuming and fragmented. It became clear that there was a real need to remodel the existing system to be more streamlined and offer an accurate, timely financial plan, which was integrated with and related to actual performance.
The group also runs a number of different ERP solutions that suit the individual business unit requirements for financial transaction processing and reporting. However to bring this information together at month-end was challenging and heavily reliant on complicated spreadsheets.
To streamline this process required standardisation of ERP’s and charts of accounts across the group or the implementation of a tool to interact with multiple financial systems and provide a single composite view for the group. The implementation of IDU offered the best solution.
GPI Slots implemented the idu-Concept Financial Budgeting and Financial Reporting Modules in 2016 to address these requirements.
“Since implementing IDU, reporting at has improved immensely and the budget process is being completed far more efficiently, streamlining the cycle considerably”. – Shaun Barends, General Manager of Group Finance.
Previously, with central budgets, there was little transparency and ownership engendered in the budget process and consequently little accountability assumed for the end product.
In the IDU environment budget capture is decentralised and this has created true transparency and a good general feeling of ownership which will translate into accountability when variances against budget start to be measured.
IDU has definitely reduced the time taken to complete budgets and this year, having extended the use to more budget types, we are beginning to realise the true potential of the tool.
Creating budgets by individual has also been an eye opener in terms of its ease of use and, again, the transparency this has created around the make-up of our personnel costs.