Habitat en Région (HER) Logo

Customer Story

How Habitat en Région tripled its reporting scope – and closed 15 days sooner

Success story Habitat en Région (HER)

When new regulations made full statutory consolidation mandatory for all 13 Habitat en Région (HER) housing companies, the lean finance team faced compliance pressure and data-quality headaches. By replacing error-prone spreadsheets with Lucanet, HER centralized every figure, accelerated the year-end close, and created a trusted data hub for more than 30 stakeholders.

  • 15 days

    faster year-end close

How Habitat en Région uses Lucanet software:
  • New housing law mandated statutory consolidation across 13 housing companies
  • Excel-based process couldn’t scale: six different reporting scopes and multiple ERPs
  • Only 2 FTEs in the shared-service centre; every new report meant late nights
  • Data-quality doubts undermined trust and slowed audits

About the company

Habitat en Région (HER) is the social-housing arm of France’s Groupe BPCE, uniting 13 regional providers under a single shared-service organization. With around 3,300 employees and more than €1 billion in annual rent revenue, HER delivers affordable housing nationwide while advancing sustainability and social impact.

Lucanet let us triple our statutory reporting scope without adding headcount. What began as a compliance task is now the single source everyone trusts.

Anne Fehr

Head of Consolidation & Data

Anne Fehr

The Challenge

Spreadsheets, scattered ERPs, and tight deadlines

When France’s ELAN law first required full statutory consolidation, Habitat en Région’s lean finance hub met the challenge with the tools they already knew best: two specialists at the shared-service centre opened Excel, collated trial balances from 13 housing companies and began stitching the numbers together by hand. Each subsidiary exported its data from a differently configured ERP. Nothing came in clean; every sheet demanded re-mapping, control checks and manual eliminations before a single consolidated figure could be produced.

 

Keeping regulators satisfied was only half the job. The same team also prepared management packs for six distinct reporting scopes. One misplaced comma could ripple across every workbook, forcing late-night error hunts and eroding confidence in the figures just as new ESG disclosures loomed on the horizon.

 

By February each year the pressure reached its peak. Trial balances trickled in at different times, version-control nightmares multiplied, and every deadline felt immovable. The finance centre knew that another reporting cycle built on spreadsheets and email chains would no longer scale; something fundamental had to change.

The Solution

Trusted data, faster consolidation

Habitat en Région selected Lucanet’s CFO Solution Platform through a public tender, then dove straight into hands-on workshops where real group figures were loaded on day one. Five months later the first year-end close ran entirely inside Lucanet. Trial balances from all 13 companies now flow through a controlled collection workspace that runs automated checks and mappings before the numbers ever hit the ledger. Capital and minority adjustments execute in the background, and six statutory scopes can be generated at the press of a button—no spreadsheets, no version confusion.

 

Because the database is truly multidimensional, Anne Fehr, Head of Consolidation & Data, and her colleague could spin up new perspectives with a few clicks: a statutory P&L for regulators, a management P&L for executives, even a recoverable-charges statement unique to French social housing. The same single source of truth fed a Power BI model via Lucanet’s ready-made script, so dashboards refreshed in minutes rather than weeks. Freed from manual work, the team opened a “sandbox” inside Lucanet to experiment with ESG metrics and solvency ratios—tasks that had once felt out of reach. Most telling, auditors received read-only access to the platform, found the interface self-explanatory, and stopped asking for ad-hoc Excel reports.

How Lucanet software benefits HER:

  • Centralized, fully auditable financial data across 13 companies
  • 3× more statutory reports delivered with the same team
  • Year-end close 15 days faster
  • Over 30 users – finance managers, controllers, auditors – work in Lucanet daily
  • Future-proof foundation for ESG, taxonomy, and cash-flow modules