Dramatically accelerates reporting and fuels business expansion

Adaptive Insights, the leader in cloud corporate performance management (CPM), today announced that Eaton Towers, a leading independent telecom tower company in Africa, has implemented Adaptive Insights’ software to consolidate financials across seven countries, transforming its financial reporting and driving business expansion. The software deployment enabled Eaton Towers to accelerate its monthly reporting by 100 percent and facilitated its raise of $350 million in equity funding last year, which was critical to the company’s expansion from three to six markets in less than a year.

Eaton Towers has set out on a bold mission to help bring affordable mobile communications to Africa. With 5,000 towers in seven African countries, it has the most diversified geographical tower portfolio on the continent. The company deployed Adaptive Consolidation, part of the Adaptive Suite, to give it visibility into the performance of each region, and Adaptive OfficeConnect, to allow easy, professional reporting of that performance to both current and potential investors.

“The delivery of affordable mobile communications requires that we carefully manage our own financial performance and our expenses,” said Peter Cannan, group financial controller. “At the same time, we are on a fast growth trajectory and needed software that I could set up myself and would be easily understood by our users with very little training. Adaptive Insights software fit the bill, and today we are rolling up and reporting on substantial amounts of data—sometimes with the simple click of a button.”

According to the Adaptive Insights CFO Indicator Q3 2015 report, one-third of CFOs predict the amount of data they manage will increase over 50 percent within the next five years. Additionally, 41 percent of finance teams manage data from three to five source systems, and 22 percent pull from as many as five to 10 systems. The increase in both data and data sources has a significant impact on finance teams of all sizes and across all industries looking to consolidate and report performance.

Eaton Towers uses Adaptive Consolidation to roll up income and balance sheets, cash flow, revenue, and capex analysis. The company also leverages Adaptive OfficeConnect, a tool that allows users to easily create high-quality reports, board books, and presentations within Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. The tool gives users total control over formatting and the power to refresh data with one click. These solutions together have enabled Eaton Towers to satisfy investors’ high standards for reporting and governance, delivering accurate financial information in a professional and reliable format.

“For fast-growing businesses, there are great benefits to be had from the agility and flexibility of cloud technology–as it effectively scales as the business does,” said Ian Preston, vice president of United Kingdom & Ireland, Adaptive Insights. “This agility is even more important for Eaton Towers, which has the added challenge of working across a vast geographical distance. Using our software, the finance team has been able to transform its processes across a continent, making its financial viability clear to investors, and putting the infrastructure in place for further growth.”