For their Real Estate and Accounting department PensionDenmark has developed a solution with Power BI and Accobat's Planning tool accoPLANNING for handling budgeting and maintaining masterdata.

PensionDanmark downloaded accoPLANNING at Microsoft AppSource, and started the journey themselves with support from Accobat.

“ Having a common solution, where we have Budgeting into Power BI with a writeback capability of accoPLANNING, is a very good

fit for us "

Jacob Rønnow, Head of Data & Analytics (Datahub)

“ I downloaded it from AppSource, so I knew the app had been certified [...]

It was a matter of a few hours,

and then we were up and running,

and building on the solution”.

Stig Lauridsen, Senior BI Specialist (Datahub)

“ After the implementation of accoPLANNING, we have eliminated all Excel from our budgeting and reporting processes [...]”.

Hung Huynh, Accounting Chief (Property Department)

PensionDanmark is one of the largest European pension funds. They have 800.000 members in 23.000 private and public companies. They are all covered by collective agreements between 11 unions and 28 employers' association.

PROPERTY

The property department in PensionDanmark is the area where they use accoPLANNING.

They invest and develop housing for seniors, hotels, domiciles etc.

Jacob Rønnow,

Head of Data & Analytics (Datahub)

• Worked with data and analytics since 1997
• Worked in pension for 15 years 
• A part of Microsoft Executive Board for Data and AI in Denmark

Stig Lauridsen,

Senior BI Specialist (Datahub)

• 23 years of experience with data and analytics
• Working with Power BI and Datawarehousing 

Hung Huynh,

Accounting Chief  (Properties)

• Responsible for Financial follow up
• Project Management making a report about the property projects
• Solution owner end user of accoPLANNING

The solution is based on accountingdata from Navision, that runs into a Data Delivery Platform

and is made available in Power BI connected with accoPLANNING.

PensionDanmark's main problem was that they had two different systems for maintaining budgets and comments, creating a problem for the project leaders. The main purpose of accoPLANNING was to solve the issues concerning budgeting, but also for maintaining master data. 

In the beginning Jacob Rønnow, Head of Data and Analytics, went to the the CFO and told him about accoPLANNING, and together they evaluated the tool. PensionDanmark requested a demo and trial version, and took a dialogue with Accobat about the features they needed. PensionDanmark was able to give feedback and custom the solution as they wanted. In February 2023 they went live.

According to PensionDanmark, accoPLANNING has a top functionality: a writeback function into the Azure SQL database. PensionDenmark is especially fond of using the functionalities "Comments" and "Audit" - which enables the project leaders to comment on the budget.

The main users of accoPLANNING are the Accounting Chief Hung Huynh and ten project leaders in the property department - more are expected to use it in the future. Hung Huynh integrated a lock file to follow all the differences. Together with the project leaders he did a test phase during the implementation so that the tool got implemented the right way.

PensionDanmark's missing link was the ability to do writeback, and accoPLANNING stands out from other solutions because it's connected directly to Power BI. For PensionDanmark it was important that they had a tool that had Power BI as it’s origin - not the other way around.

Reporting is built into accoPLANNING and the approval functionality is an important feature for PensionDanmark. accoPLANNING met all their expectations. It was possible to have an impact on the solution, and if the success continues, they will expand accoPLANNING to other areas. For now accoPLANNING fulfills a business need, and they are using the tool to handle budgets in the real estate area.

PensionDanmark is satisfied with the good dialogue with Accobat regarding the implementation of accoPLANNING. For them Accobat, as a local partner, was the obvious choice for the project. At the same time they wanted to be a part of something that can really take off and they could not find other solutions that fit the criteria with budgeting and reporting in the same interface, and that had Power BI as a starting point.