Picture 45 companies, each with its own general ledger and its own bank accounts, and one group controller who needs to know by Monday morning how much cash the group holds. In most finance departments that sentence describes a project. At N+P Group, it describes a refresh.
N+P turns waste into sustainable resources. The business trades waste streams, sorts recyclables into commodity streams, and processes what cannot be recycled into alternative fuels. With more than 500 employees across the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and about 45 legal entities, its structure turns reporting into a daily logistics problem. Group Financial Controller Chris Hoyle has seen the alternative up close. He once implemented Business Central for a business without Exsion, calls that a mistake in hindsight, and remembers a team that spent its first six months downloading reports and compiling them by hand.
The reporting at N+P runs on standardized Excel reports that pull straight from Business Central through Exsion Reporting. The same logic serves three altitudes: the individual legal entity, the business unit, and the group. Two monthly management consolidations and a shareholder consolidation come out of that structure, and nobody assembles them from separate downloads.
The mechanics are simpler than they sound. In Business Central each entity is its own company, with its own G/L Entry and Bank Account Ledger Entry tables. In the query grid the team ticks the companies it wants, and one table comes back with a company column, which is what makes group-level reporting possible without an export per entity. Groups that need intercompany eliminations and currency translation on top can add Exsion Corporate, and our walkthrough of consolidating multiple companies in Excel shows how the pieces fit. Microsoft documents its own consolidation route for formal consolidated statements.
The practical difference shows up during month-end. A refresh of 700,000 G/L Entry rows takes under five seconds, so the team refreshes the reports as the close progresses and sees problems while there is still time to fix them. The group controller checks the close each morning instead of waiting to be told it is finished.
Consolidating cash across 40 to 50 entities, each with its own bank accounts, is the kind of job that expands to fill whatever time it is given. Hoyle says that without direct data access the team could review group cash at best once a month, and in an environment where positions move quickly that is not fast enough. Today the consolidated cash flow report runs every week at entity, business unit, and group level, and it serves both daily cash management and the liquidity picture that management sees.
Nothing about the banks changed. The gathering step disappeared, and with it the reason cash could only be reviewed monthly.
Cash makes a good stress test for any group, because it touches every bank account in every entity. A report that survives that has already solved the multi-company problem for everything else. Once the query returns a company column, the same table can feed cash, revenue, and margin, which is why N+P did not need a new build for each question.
Figure: N+P Group at a glance. Source: N+P Group case study, Exsion365, June 2026.
N+P's trading division adds a wrinkle most finance teams never face. Tonnage data from the operational software flows into Business Central, so the same report can hold operational and financial figures side by side. The team structures reports by customer and supplier and reads revenue, cost of sales, and margin for each contract. Because the budget follows the same structure, month-end variances show up without rebuilding anything, and a contract whose margin slipped sits in the same view as the tonnage that explains it.
N+P went from 7 Exsion licenses to 50 in four years, and it is worth being direct about what that number means: it is an adoption story, not a purchasing one. The whole finance team works in the same reporting environment, from the management team to the administrators at individual sites.
Three things keep that workable. New colleagues get access on their first day and are paired with an experienced user in a buddy system, and they work independently after a couple of sessions over a couple of days. Requests from the business, which run at 10 to 20 a month, go to experienced key users who build the answer directly, so there is no project plan and no wait. And because Exsion inherits Business Central permissions, a site administrator who can see one company sees one company in Excel, while the group controller sees all 45. Nobody maintained a second security model as the license count climbed.
"We just press refresh and the data flows through," Hoyle says. That is a modest description of what changed, because the freed-up hours go to interpretation instead of assembly, and the finance team is now expected to explain the numbers rather than collect them.
Business Central now offers Copilot help with bank reconciliation, matching bank transactions to ledger entries and suggesting matches where standard rules fall short, and Microsoft's guide explains the reconciliation process. N+P has a project underway to move its full reconciliation into Business Central, and Exsion's job shifts with it, from building the reconciliation in Excel to checking it. Exception lists, general ledger checks, and reconciliation reports will let management accountants work as reviewers instead of hands-on preparers.
Auto-matching is not the same as provably correct, and that gap is where the interesting work now sits. How much of the matched output does a controller need to see before signing off, and which exceptions deserve a human at all? Each finance team will answer that for itself, probably by asking how quickly it can pull up the entries behind a match it does not trust.