Caseware helps Constantia Insurance streamline creation of complex financial reporting

Business challenge

Constantia has several operating companies, each of which needs to produce annual financial statements. The process of drafting these was outsourced for a number of years, but this did not prove to be a satisfactory solution. The company decided to move the process in house to control it better and reduce delays.

In line with its practice of using technology wherever possible to gain efficiencies, Constantia purchased Caseware Working Papers with the XBRL conversion add-on. Working Papers automate the process of creating annual financial statements, while the XBRL conversion is used to reformat the financials for the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC). Many companies face the challenge of reporting in different formats and are coming to rely on Caseware for assistance.

A challenge was that the insurance industry has very specific financial reporting requirements, which meant the template had to be developed more or less from scratch. “Caseware put in a lot of work to create the base template and tailor it to align with the requirements for insurance disclosure,” says Viloshni Govender, Financial Accountant at Constantia Insurance and Caseware Champion in the firm. “Caseware also provided excellent training that has empowered our in-house team to get the most out of the software.” The implementation of Caseware solutions has made it easier and quicker for Constantia to generate the annual financial statements. It is also easier to make changes and because the data is centralised, there is no issue with version control, something that makes manual drafting very prone to error. The company is also experiencing cost savings by being able to complete the process in house, using existing resources.