How Velixo Has Helped Hoffman Southwest!

Hoffman Southwest Corp has numerous companies under their umbrella, which are dedicated to providing underground infrastructure services to municipalities, utilities, government agencies, construction and engineering firms across North America.

In business for over 70 years, with multiple entities and over 500 employees, Hoffman Southwest needed a simple yet effective reporting solution like Velixo to assist their accounting team create financial reports for multiple entities. As one of our loyal clients since 2018, Hoffman has experienced increased efficiencies, fewer manual errors, faster access to accurate reports, and a streamlined reporting process.

We recently spoke with Sofie Westerlund, Assistant Controller, to find out more about her experience with Velixo.

1. What were the biggest problems you had with reporting that caused you to look for a better way?

“We never really developed our reporting in Acumatica, but that was something we needed. For example we had one report where we were showing a historical trend and we had one consolidated tab for the whole business, and then a separate tab for each business client, so something like that was not efficient, and the fact that we already had our reporting set up with Acumatica, it was just very easy to transition to Velixo.”

2. Why Velixo?

“The fact that is was Excel! It was very accessible for all of us and not a separate application that had to be installed. I also think that because we have multiple businesses and business units and divisions, it’s an easy way to replicate things across different units. It’s very helpful.”

3. Describe what the implementation experience was like?

“We went up the beginning of June with Acumatica and by the end of June we needed to have our reporting set up. Immediately we got in contact with Gabriel at Velixo and we started setting up our workbook. Luckily we already had a lot of our reporting set up in Excel, so the implementation of Velixo for us was very pain-free. It was basically taking our existing reporting package and converting it to Velixo formulas. Gabriel was very responsive and there were a few things that worked differently compared to what we had before, but he actually made some improvements to the tool while we were figuring out this package and getting it up and running. I don’t think we could have expected anything better.”

4. How has Excel-based reporting made your life easier?

“A lot of the routine tasks have been able to be automated. Reporting in general, just the fact that you can run a report in 30 seconds rather than 10 minutes … what it used to be, just time wise it has cut down quite a bit. Definitely cutting out the manual elements of some of the accounting that we do and preparation.”

5. What incremental benefits have you seen?

“Being in Excel… especially for accounting everyday,  there’s a lot of workbooks and a lot of things we use Excel for, and being able to pull in GL information directly into your workbook as your working is very convenient. If you have allocations that you need to do, you can set up your calculations right in the workbook and pull in the GL information. You even have the ability to upload into Acumatica from Velixo. It’s a one stop thing.  As before we were more manual…. It’s just workable and flexible.”

6. What factors made Velixo the obvious choice to solve your reporting problems?

“That’s one of the benefits of Velixo, is that it’s so user friendly. For someone who works a lot with Excel, a lot of accountants do, it’s just a very easy transition into that tool. It’s very logical and flexible. Instead of using Acumatica, and generating all of the reports there, we went with Velixo. We were able to mirror exactly what we had before, and better by using Velixo.”

We would like to thank Hoffman Southwest, Sofie Westerlund , and the team at SlapFive for this video case study.

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