Customer Story
When Julbo joined the Peugeot group, the business stepped into a new league. Reporting requirements changed overnight: the new shareholder and the banks wanted reliable figures, and they wanted them fast. At the time, the annual close took several months. Here is how Julbo cut that timeline to 30 days with Lucanet.
30 days
for annual close
-50 %
time for monthly close
Julbo has designed and manufactured sports eyewear and accessories for 200 years. The company started in a niche market, serving the French Army's Chasseurs Alpins mountain troops and the Swiss Army, then expanded into sport. Today, it generates €55 million in consolidated revenue. When the group came under the control of the Peugeot family, its finance function had to operate at an entirely new scale.
Lucanet has been a cornerstone of our finance transformation. It's the tool that allowed us to make our figures reliable very quickly, at a time when we had no other choice.
Alexandre Moutardier
CFO, Julbo Group
Before using Lucanet, Julbo ran its entire consolidation process in Excel. The team collected trial balances from several local accounting frameworks (French, Romanian and Italian) and tried to stitch them together by hand. "We no longer really knew whether we were working under IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) or French GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles)," explains Alexandre Moutardier, Group CFO. The result: frequent discrepancies and a process he describes himself as unreliable.
The cost of that fragility became clear the moment he joined Julbo. The previous year's accounts were still open, and the year before that was still being finalized. Meanwhile, the new shareholders required reliable monthly reporting within 15 days at most. Staying on Excel put that target out of reach.
The project moved fast. The CFO's arrival kicked off the transformation, followed quickly by the launch of the enterprise performance management (EPM) project. Julbo produced its first consolidated income statement in Lucanet within the first month. Supported by a Lucanet consultant in a workshop format, the finance team took ownership of the tool while running an enterprise resource planning (ERP) migration at the same time. "We didn't wait for the migration to finish before we started consolidating with the right tool," says Alexandre Moutardier.
Lucanet now eliminates Julbo's intercompany transactions automatically, matching one entity's receivables account against the other entity's payables account. It also calculates foreign exchange differences with no manual rate adjustments. The result: the monthly close dropped from 20 days to 10-12 days within the first months of use, then stabilized at 15 days maximum.
Julbo achieved these results under transitional conditions. Throughout the migration to Sage X3, the team worked in a degraded mode, with no native connectors between the ERP and Lucanet. Once the migration is complete, the finance team will save even more time on consolidation, with accounting data flowing in directly through the right connectors.
The group's balance sheet, management income statement and cash flow statement now run on Lucanet queries through the Excel add-in. Board decks update automatically. "I spend as little time as possible producing documents and more time on analysis and the message I want to get across," says Alexandre Moutardier.
Adoption required no prior technical expertise. "After a few hours of training, I understood the basic features. After 3 weeks, I could post consolidation entries, import and export data and use the Excel add-in," reports Alexandre Moutardier. More recently, the management control team integrated a new entity into Lucanet almost entirely on its own, with no outside support. The same team then ran the following year's budget without any involvement from the CFO.
What Julbo built is automation: structured, reliable and controlled. Intercompany eliminations, foreign exchange differences and board deck updates all run on rules the finance team defines, not on an opaque algorithm. "We know exactly why every number is what it is," says the CFO. That level of traceability and control allowed Julbo to meet the expectations of a demanding shareholder.
AI will enrich these processes at a later stage. Today, rigorous automation is what transformed Julbo's finance function.