For their Real Estate and Accounting department PensionDenmark has developed a solution with Power BI and Accobat's Planning tool accoPLANNING for handling budgeting and maintaining masterdata.

PensionDanmark downloaded accoPLANNING at Microsoft AppSource, and started the journey themselves with support from Accobat.

“ Having a common solution, where we have Budgeting into Power BI with a writeback capability of accoPLANNING, is a very good fit for us "

Jacob Rønnow, Head of Data & Analytics (Datahub)

“ I downloaded it from AppSource,

so I knew the app had been certified [...]

It was a matter of a few hours,

and then we were up and running,

and building on the solution”.

Stig Lauridsen, Senior BI Specialist (Datahub)

“ After the implementation of accoPLANNING, we have eliminated all Excel from our budgeting and reporting processes [...]”.

Hung Huynh, Accounting Chief (Property Department)

PensionDanmark is one of the largest European pension funds. They have 800.000 members in 23.000 private and public companies.

They are all covered by collective agreements between 11 unions and 28 employers' association.

PROPERTY

The property department in PensionDanmark is the area where they use accoPLANNING.

They invest and develop housing for seniors, hotels, domiciles etc.

Jacob Rønnow,

Head of Data & Analytics (Datahub)

• Worked with data and analytics since 1997
• Worked in pension for 15 years 
• A part of Microsoft Executive Board for Data and AI in Denmark

Stig Lauridsen,

Senior BI Specialist (Datahub)

• 23 years of experience with data and analytics
• Working with Power BI and Datawarehousing

Hung Huynh,

Accounting Chief  (Properties)

• Responsible for Financial follow up
• Project Management making a report about the property projects
• Solution owner end user of accoPLANNING
  

 The solution is based on accountingdata from Navision, that runs into a Data Delivery Platform

and is made available in Power BI connected with accoPLANNING.

• Access to and basic usage of Power BI
• Azure SQL Database

• Audit-log
• Comments (the project leader can comment on the need for the budget)
• Writeback
• Click and unclick (Administrators can enable what the user can/can not see)
• Drag and drop
• Check box (used to close or lock a budget version so no one can use it and make changes)
• Possible to work in different versions of the budget
• Security can authorize who is allowed to write back in to the SQL Database 

Effects

• Realtime update of planning data
• Higher Data quality
• Immediate insight
• Faster Decisions
• Master Data update in accoPlanning
• One Tool only – for Project Management follow up
• Saving Time

PensionDanmark's main problem was that they had two different systems for maintaining budgets and comments, creating a problem for the project leaders. The main purpose of accoPLANNING was to solve the issues concerning budgeting, but also for maintaining master data. 

In the beginning Jacob Rønnow, Head of Data and Analytics, went to the the CFO and told him about accoPLANNING, and together they evaluated the tool. PensionDanmark requested a demo and trial version, and took a dialogue with Accobat about the features they needed. PensionDanmark was able to give feedback and custom the solution as they wanted. In February 2023 they went live.

According to PensionDanmark, accoPLANNING has a top functionality: a writeback function into the Azure SQL database. PensionDenmark is especially fond of using the functionalities "Comments" and "Audit" - which enables the project leaders to comment on the budget.

The main users of accoPLANNING are the Accounting Chief Hung Huynh and ten project leaders in the property department - more are expected to use it in the future. Hung Huynh integrated a lock file to follow all the differences. Together with the project leaders he did a test phase during the implementation so that the tool got implemented the right way.

PensionDenmark mentions AppSource as an important asset when downloading accoPLANNING. PensionDanmark is a Microsoft house, they are running on Navision (NAV), and Power BI is one of the tools on the shelf. Downloading accoPLANNING was therefore a good fit from a security and compliance point of view. It was easy to download and work with, and it was only a matter of a few hours before it was up and running.

PensionDanmark is satisfied with the good dialogue with Accobat regarding the implementation of accoPLANNING. For them Accobat, as a local partner, was the obvious choice for the project. At the same time they wanted to be a part of something that can really take off and they could not find other solutions that fit the criteria with budgeting and reporting in the same interface, and that had Power BI as a starting point.