Caverion is one of the largest European building technology companies with a revenue of approximately EUR 2.2 billion in 2020. By making built environments smart and sustainable, Caverion enables performance and people’s well-being. The company offers its customers solutions for the entire life cycle of their buildings, infrastructure or industrial sites and processes. These include design & build, projects, technical and industrial maintenance, facility management as well as advisory services. Caverion’s customers are supported by over 15,000 professionals in 11 countries in Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. Caverion’s shares are listed on Nasdaq Helsinki. Caverion was established through the demerger of Building Services and Industrial Services businesses from YIT Group in June 2013.

The goal is to meet the ESEF requirements and automation of interim reports

“The starting point of the system implementation was to upgrade Caverion’s external reporting process so as to allow Caverion to address the new ESEF reporting requirement,” says Hanna Uusihakala, Head of Group Financial Accounting. The purpose of the project was to prepare the 2020 annual review using the new system. According to the ESEF requirement, the financial statements were to be published as an xHTML file with XBRL tags.

Read more about the ESEF reporting requirements here.

“It was important for us that we get more benefits from the new system than just a report that meets the ESEF requirements. We wanted to also be able to utilize the system in the automation of interim reports. Some systems were eliminated because they were only able to address the ESEF requirement. After a few demos, Certent CDM seemed to suit our needs. The system seemed well-functioning and intuitive,” says Hanna Uusihakala.

Report that meets the ESEF requirements was created in collaboration

Caverion and Intito started to process the annual review in close collaboration in Summer 2020. From the very beginning, the Caverion team was able to get familiar with the new system by importing the pre-designed Word and Excel templates into the Certent CDM. The migration to the new system was started well before the actual reporting began so that the structure and visual part of the report were ready when the reporting started to effortlessly accommodate the report content and figures.

“Our supplier selection was strongly guided by the choice of software. Intito was a significant Certent CDM solution supplier with a proven track record of large listed companies as their reference. Their consultants have solid expertise in technical and content matters. For these reasons, we chose to cooperate with Intito,” says Mika Reponen, Manager, Group Financial Accounting.

A major part of the project consisted of preparing the XBRL tags. At this stage, Intitos’s experts helped Caveron’s external reporting team to understand the taxonomy and find the right elements for the XBRL tags and to interpret the validation messages. The use of correct XBRL tags is the basis for creating a valid ESEF-compliant report.

“Of course, a large project such a this involved challenges as well. We had to do a lot of work to introduce the new system and change the processes. The challenges were certainly partly related to the fact that for the first time, the reporting was carried out in compliance with the ESEF requirement. Other listed companies have faced similar challenges in meeting this ESEF requirement. The project has been a learning experience for all of us. However, Intito’s experts were flexible when the need was most pressing, and we were able to publish the annual review to our full satisfaction in accordance with our planned schedule using the new system,” says Mika Reponen.

Thanks to the project, the entire reporting process, from the completion of figures up to the completed pdf and zip files, is now more in Caverion’s control. Caverion’s reporting team has the competence to carry out most of the changes and development necessary for the reporting. The annual review published with Certent CDM (LINK) is also highly functional. It contains clickable headings that make the report easier to read.

Automatization streamlines interim report process

“In addition to the ESEF requirement, we have also been able to utilize the new system in the automation of the interim report process. Above all, we seek to add automation to interim reports with regard to the text and data variables. Visually, the annual review (LINK) is consistent with the previous year’s report, which was selected globally among the top 350 annual reports in position #337 (Source: Annual Reports on Annual Reports study). Therefore, we decided to use the same layout also this year. I believe that the hard work we did this time will pay itself back. The automation of the external reporting process will increase our efficiency and streamline our work,” Mika Reponen concludes.

Cooperation is currently continuing with small-scale development, the main emphasis being on increasing automation in external reporting and figures. The objective is to achieve a reporting process in which all the figures have been automated, also within the text, so as to be automatically updated as soon as the data is ready. The intention is to automate the actions that are repeated from one quarter to another.