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Is there a need for help with bookkeeping if the bookkeeping can be automated? An important question, which became the starting point for Hårklinikken to automate and centralise their finance function across borders and leave the bookkeeping to a robot. So they can focus on creating the best conditions – for their customers' hair as well as the company's growth journey.
Hårklinikken is present on three continents and has clinics in Dubai, on 5th Avenue in New York, on the main street in Reykjavik and on historic Amaliegade in Copenhagen. The customer base is diverse, and the clinic is visited by both women and men, celebrities and ordinary Copenhageners. What they all have in common is a desire to achieve their hair's full potential, whether that's thicker and more lustrous hair or a daily life without hair loss and the vulnerability that can entail.
Because as Hårklinikken says: "It's not just hair. It's you." An ambition and a promise you clearly feel as soon as you step through the door at the Copenhagen clinic, which exudes both care and professionalism.
It's a sunny Friday just before the summer holidays, and we've arranged to meet Hårklinikken's CFO, Danny Diduch, to talk about the automation journey that the finance function is well underway with.
When too many cooks create chaos in the kitchen
But before we sink our teeth into the automations, it's important to understand how Hårklinikken services its customers and generates sales.
Hårklinikken has different types of customers: Those who go through a treatment programme at one of Hårklinikken's clinics, where they are connected to the clinic's experts and receive tailored treatment for their hair and scalp; and those who diligently purchase and are fans of the mainstream hair products that the clinic develops itself and sells online in their webshop.
But the distribution of the two customer groups differs markedly from country to country where the company has clinics. In Denmark, for example, 50% of total sales take place online, in Dubai 90% of total sales happen physically in the clinic, whilst sales are 80% online in the USA. And what does that mean, you might wonder?
It means that the posting of different revenue groups such as online product sales, the clinics' POS sales, consultations, discounts, campaigns etc., made it necessary to transfer data to the ERP systems with more details than a standard integration could accommodate
"We experienced a really high drain on resources due to the many manual postings, which meant that we had several months' worth of revenue that hadn't been recorded. We're a business with 30 years under our belt, but we come from a place where everything was printed and filed in folders, where there were few documented workflows and five countries that ran their finance departments in five different ways in different systems without shared reporting," Danny explains and continues.
"The whole starting point for reaching out to Basico was actually to see if we could outsource our bookkeeping to them. But then they asked us the question: Will there be a need for help with bookkeeping if we can automate the entire bookkeeping process? And get the sales figures to reconcile across Shopify and the ERP systems."
It was a good question. And it was precisely what became the springboard for Hårklinikken's automation journey and for the task that we at Basico have helped Hårklinikken solve.
Automating towards order and control
To bring order to the chaos, Hårklinikken centralised the finance function and introduced a common chart of accounts, and all the repetitive routine tasks associated with posting sales data are now handled automatically by a robot.
"Previously, we had one person in each country handling the accounting. Now we have a central team, where one person here in Copenhagen checks the figures, because transparency has been created in the process and there's room for ongoing controls. It has generally been a smooth process with our robot, which posts transactions every day. The only thing we need to remember is that the computer is switched on where it 'works' from. It has its own robot user profile and email, so even though the human touches of transaction data have been taken out of the equation, we can follow where the robot has been involved," Danny explains.
"In fact, there is a standard integration between Shopify and our ERP systems. But that standard integration is not sufficiently granular to cover our needs. We wanted our sales data in the ERP at a more detailed level and better ability to reconcile payments from the card providers. It has been a relatively simple matter to implement with individual local adjustments. The robot has been the same across countries, and all countries use Shopify as their sales platform and have the same chart of accounts. Therefore, it has not presented challenges to transfer data to different ERP systems from country to country. Moreover, the business and structural decisions were made when integrating the first country, so after that it was a duplication exercise for the subsequent countries."
"If there has been one stumbling block, it's the time differences across the countries in the project. But I and we as a business haven't felt the impact of that, because Basico has shown such great flexibility in getting the project to fly despite it," Danny rounds off his point and adds: "They have simply been stars, the consultants we've had assigned."
ERP | consultancy and implementation
One automation leads to another
"The best advice regarding automation I can give is: Just get started!", Danny smiles and adds passionately: "I've actually made a list of things I want to have automated. And the beauty of it is that there are only savings and benefits associated with automating all those tasks that are repetitive and happen week after week. The start of our journey and the collaboration with Basico has been a huge eye-opener for what possibilities there are to automate both workflows and tasks. So it has really just given me an appetite for more."
"If I'm to lift the veil on one of my future wishes, it's that the robot can eventually fill in graphs itself and transfer them to presentations in PowerPoint, which can be used for the management report. But first we need to look into the entire reporting part to work out how it can look and be automated across countries. But that will be on the other side of the summer holidays," Danny emphasises.
"That being said, Hårklinikken is on an ambitious growth journey with the opening of more clinics and new markets. And we're already ready for that in finance," Danny rounds off our conversation with anticipation.
Unfortunately, we can't predict the future ...
Therefore, there may be things that have changed since our articles were published – the participants may have changed jobs, and the world may have been turned upside down by American presidents and other catalysts for unexpected events – you get the point. Since we visited Danny Diduch in July 2021, he has changed jobs and is now an independent financial consultant.
Competencies – all the way round
When we help to digitise and automate finance functions, we optimise applications and tools that meet your needs. We do it in a way that ensures the solution best supports the data, processes and the people who work hard behind the scenes.
This case article gives you an insight into how Partner Morten Boldsen and the team helped Hårklinikken to automate and centralise their finance function across borders and hand over the bookkeeping to a robot.
Do you need sparring for your automation journey?
Do you want to create the best framework for your automation initiative to get off to a good start, so you can sit back whilst your automations work for you? Then reach out to us, and we can start the dialogue about how our consultants can help develop automated processes with precisely the tools that are most effective for the workflows in your business. We have miles of experience with that.
