Lab Supplies Group is an AUCTUS-backed group of specialists serving the pharmaceutical, environmental, and chemical markets. Its laboratory businesses supply analytical equipment, containment systems, consumables, and technical services. The company operates across Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom. The group also includes a medical equipment business that provides sterilization and hospital equipment for military and civilian use.
I want our business to become a ‘Champions League’ company. Arc gives me the financial visibility and analysis to see what needs attention and guide management toward that goal.
Reporting could not keep pace with cash and operating decisions
As Lab Supplies Group integrated its medical equipment business, it needed timely reporting to strengthen cash forecasting, accounting review, and analysis of orders and operating performance. For a private equity-backed group, those capabilities are critical for monitoring performance and responding to emerging issues.
For Stefan Neumann, Interim CFO, meeting those expectations meant building the finance team, strengthening accounting practices, and producing the analysis needed to guide faster, more informed decisions. “My shareholder expected results,” he says. “I needed the analysis and the numbers to deliver them.”
Stefan’s role covers the group, but his immediate focus was the medical business. There, financial and operational records sat in different accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, adding complexity and leaving finance to piece the data together manually.
Initially, Stefan received the monthly financials from DATEV as a PDF and retyped the figures into Excel. Direct access to DATEV came later, but extracting the records remained complicated. Every hour spent preparing the numbers was an hour not spent interpreting them for management.
Checking for adjustments and inconsistent postings also meant manually reviewing DATEV records. For operational analysis, orders added another step. Stefan asked a colleague to export order confirmations and issued invoices from Myfactory, the medical business’s ERP system. He then combined the two data sets, comparing the value of incoming orders with the amount billed. The 13-week cash forecast was the heaviest task, taking a week to prepare.
For the CFO of a private equity-backed company, those analyses also needed a complete record of activity. An invoice might be in someone’s hands without being entered into the system, leaving it out of the records available for analysis. Stefan, therefore, needed invoices and other transactions recorded consistently to close gaps in the figures used for cash and performance decisions.
At the shareholder’s suggestion, Lab Supplies Group adopted Arc’s AI-powered finance platform to speed up financial data retrieval and analysis.
I needed to guide management, but first I had to assemble the figures in Excel. Arc connected to DATEV and gave me the financial records to do the analysis.
Arc connects fragmented records for cash forecasting and financial control
Lab Supplies Group began by connecting Arc to DATEV and retrieving several years of accounting history. Arc gave Stefan a single place to examine the available financial data, investigate figures, and trace questions back to the relevant records. Within two weeks, Stefan was running analyses across the data. “I was amazed at how quickly the Arc team made the financial data available,” he says.
To investigate adjustments or inconsistent postings, Stefan asks Arc in chat for a list of relevant invoices to inspect. He reviews the records and discusses his findings with the accountant to establish what needs correcting.
Daily updates from connected sources also make newly recorded entries available for review between monthly reports. When an expected record is missing, Stefan follows up with the person responsible for entering it. By making gaps and inconsistencies more visible, Arc supports his work to improve the reliability of the records behind financial reporting. That gives management a firmer basis for cash and performance decisions.
With those data sources connected, Stefan worked with Arc to develop a separate 13-week cash forecast and its rules for 5 entities, with consolidation handled outside Arc. He uses prompts to prepare the weekly cash outlook from the available financial information, reviews the figures, and refines the prompt to tailor the forecast to his reporting needs. A forecast that took a week to prepare now takes one to two hours, giving Stefan a forward view of cash to bring into planning discussions.
Lab Supplies Group also connected Myfactory to Arc. Stefan uses the platform to combine DATEV’s accounting records with order confirmations and issued invoices from the ERP. Arc refreshes the combined data daily, eliminating the need for recurring export requests.
Using those records, Stefan investigates changes in incoming orders alongside financial performance and discusses the implications with management. He projects where the business is heading at its current run rate, considers what might change, and highlights where action is needed. He is working with Arc to develop analyses of hours and utilization to inform management’s decisions about capacity.
Stefan now draws on daily financial updates from 5 companies in the medical business for cash planning, month-end reviews, and budgeting. For budgets, he brings unit data into Excel and uses Arc to investigate differences. His controller and finance colleague now use Arc, and Stefan plans to bring more senior leaders onto the platform as well.
Arc gives me daily access to check the accounting entries, and the quality of our financials is much better. The operational and financial information I need is now far more accessible.
5 companies gain stronger financial oversight with daily data from Arc
With Arc, Stefan’s work shifted from assembling numbers to interpreting them across cash, orders, and operating performance. He now advises management using daily financial and operational data instead of a monthly report.
- 1 hourto prepare a 13-week cash forecast, down from 1 week
- 5companies overseen with daily financial updates from Arc
- 1 weekto identify posting discrepancies for follow-up
Building on that work, Stefan plans to introduce Arc to a1, one of the group’s laboratory businesses, which uses SAP Business One. He expects its more structured purchasing, logistics, and financial records to enable closer cost-center analysis and a fuller view of operations. His goal is to trace spending to booked invoices, question cost changes, and use that evidence to shape planning as the group grows.
I want Arc to be the controlling tool across our group, so we spend more time looking ahead and using the numbers to guide each business toward better results.