How Carlsberg Cut Three Weeks From Their Financial Reporting Cycle with Workiva and Deloitte

Since its foundation in 1847, change has been the one constant for brewing industry giant Carlsberg Group. Through world wars, global recessions, and digital revolutions, a keen eye for innovation has helped the Danish multinational retain its status as global leader through turbulent times.

When faced with new challenges in their financial reporting process, Carlsberg knew they needed stronger tools to help them prepare for the future—which is where Deloitte and the Workiva platform came in.  

For Andreas Mailand, Head of Group Accounting for Carlsberg, combining operational understanding with strategic leadership has been a key part of his role for the past 16 years. As Andreas knows, financial processes that may have worked well for the company yesterday might invite unforeseen risk today, and it is up to him to recognize these areas and make necessary changes.

The challenge: maintaining a consistent narrative across two time-intensive annual reports in the midst of disruption

Alongside many other disclosures, including stock exchange announcements and investor communications, Andreas’ team is responsible for the annual reports and consolidated financial statements of two of Carlsberg’s major listed companies.

Producing two connected annual reports each year was no easy feat. Their manual process and heavy workload meant that the team would usually issue the two reports one month apart, leaving them open to a number of unwanted risks.

“Consistency is really important here—not just in terms of the numbers, but also in the messaging, the tone and the quality of the report. Unfortunately, if anything significant happened between the reports being published, our accounting estimates would sometimes need to be changed, which was far from ideal.”

In 2022, between publishing the first and second report, political and economic turmoil struck as war broke out in Europe. Suddenly, the entire context, analysis, and data of the first report had become outdated.

Beyond the immediate challenges that year, the team quickly recognized that this was more than a one-off issue. The rate and frequency of disruption in today’s world was unlikely to abate, and they would need a reporting platform that could help them keep up.

Speeding up and de-risking the financial reporting cycle with Workiva and Deloitte

As a platform, Workiva had already been on Andreas’ radar for a few years, but his interest was renewed and strengthened when their head of group finance shared his own positive experiences using the platform in a former role. The entire team was soon on board, choosing to partner with Deloitte for implementation.

While Andreas was confident that Workiva could speed up and de-risk their reporting process, he also knew that laying solid groundwork was essential.

“Correctly implementing a tool like this requires discipline," he said. "Thankfully, collaborating with Deloitte as our implementation partner worked exceptionally well for us. They helped us allocate the time and resources we needed to set everything up correctly within the platform and gave us essential best practice recommendations on how we were presenting our data. After explaining why we needed to make certain changes to our data model, they took on the bulk of the work themselves to ensure we didn’t run behind schedule. Their support and guidance saved us significant amounts of time going forward and put us in a very strong position to reap all the efficiency and security the tool has to offer.”

Reaping significant benefits within the first year: a faster process for two connected, simultaneous financial reports

After a tight but thorough implementation period, the Carlsberg team was able to simultaneously work on both their annual reports for the first time.

“Rather than just numbers, Workiva allowed us to link whole sections of text between reports, which allowed us to concurrently build two reports that were 95% identical. This also saved us a huge amount of time when it came to auditing because everything could be done in parallel.”

While Workiva’s data linking technology had drawn Andreas in, its ease of use and powerful collaboration capabilities really took him by surprise. Their review process was previously done by exchanging emails and manual edits on print-outs, but they were now able to exchange comments and make edits directly on the platform, speeding up the process considerably.

“As we got closer to the deadline, I really began to understand how solid the platform is. Previously, we would have to limit the number of users working on the report as the document grew bigger. With Workiva, we could keep everyone involved right until the end. This helped us divide and allocate work more effectively, avoid bottlenecks, and allocate our resources more efficiently.” 

Last-minute updates made easy

Even the best teams and tools in the world, however, can’t prevent external disruption. Just one day before the deadline, new information required significant changes to be made to the report. Luckily, this was when the rigor of the implementation really began to pay off.

“Seventeen hours before going to market, we had to make significant changes to the report. Thankfully, all the work we had put in to set everything up correctly with the Workiva platform really paid off here. We were able to upload the updated numbers, and had full visibility and control over where they would be deployed, so there wouldn’t be any surprises.” 

Three weeks cut from the reporting cycle, better quality reports, and earlier nights

When asked about tangible results, Andreas is delighted to share.

“We cut out three weeks of work, increased the quality of our output, and went to bed a bit earlier. Results on that level are incredibly rare—people can hardly believe me when I tell them. Workiva really delivers on its promises. I had high hopes for the platform, and it has surpassed my expectations. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it brought tears to my eyes!”

Looking ahead, Andreas is keen to continue building on these strong foundations.

Well before the end of the year, Carlsberg’s report was already 90% ready for next year, Andreas said, because the Workiva platform enabled them to roll content forward. “So we’re expecting even more efficiency over the next reporting period, and this has allowed us to be more ambitious and consider new ideas. Personally, I would like to continue consolidating our many sources of information across the company, which are generated using different tools. We produce so many reports and presentations based on shared data, and I’d really like to pull more information into the platform as time goes on—for more of our companies, for internal reporting, and for ESG.”

See how you can use the Workiva platform to simplify work. Request a demo at workiva.com/request-demo.