Africa Health Care

Business challenge

Fresenius Southern Africa’s, Vernon Beck (external advisor to SSA CFO, Jason Fraser) says that the company faced significant challenges in creating bi-annual and annual financial statements per requisite IFRS. Fresenius SSA operates the SAP ERM but the complexity of exporting the necessary financial information from the system into Caseware made financial reporting in line with the IFRS framework challenging.

“Caseware was the most effective and efficient financial reporting software application that was able to solve this perennial issue for us efficiently,” Mr Beck says. “We also needed to be absolutely confident that we are utilising the latest Financial Reporting Standards, issued by the IFRS which Caseware addresses by consistently updating its Financial Reporting Standard Templates with the latest standards.”

Business benefits: Streamlining the development of accurate, compliant, and timely financial statements

Fresenius Medical Care South Africa implemented the Caseware IFRS Interim, Annual and Consolidation Financial Reporting suite in January 2023.

Fresenius runs on SAP, and the process of converting the data from the SAP system into a format that is compatible to importing into Caseware to produce fully IFRS compliant financials is a complex one, Mr Beck explains. “This is where the immense technical expertise of the Caseware technical and support team proved invaluable”.
“All our requests to Caseware – no matter how large, time constrained, or complex – have been attended to and delivered,” he says.

He says that already the process of preparing financial statements for multiple companies across sub-Saharan Africa has been significantly streamlined and is now internally managed as opposed to being reliant on external consultants for financial reporting purposes. The process is far more effective, and the results are more accurate, relevant, reliable, and timeous. The automated balancing routines immediately indicate and identify anomalies and incorrectly mapped accounts which further enhances the efficiency of the account mapping and financial reporting.
For Mr Beck, the cloud functionality offers several benefits, notably the ability of users to access the system from multiple points and the reliable backups. It’s also useful that we can access the system from the office or remotely and even designated colleagues at the Fresenius head office in Germany, can access the system if required.

“Caseware’s IFRS solution is the optimal solution we found to address the SAP’s accounting data structure and the dynamic IFRS requirements but most impressive and important is the quality of the backup from the entire Caseware support team – technical and other. “It is simply outstanding”, he says.