The challenge Metsä Group faced was not simply a reporting process problem. It was a question of how to manage scale, accuracy, language and regulation simultaneously, without adding headcount. A low level of automation across a large and growing reporting scope had to be solved.
Metsä Group moved its reporting onto the Certent Disclosure Management (CDM) platform. Around 85% of the figures flowing into reports are now automated from source, with another 10% automated through Excel templates. One report is maintained at a time, in two languages, with version control, role-based rights and extensive validation rules.
Reliable reports are produced faster. Interim reports, full IFRS financial statements, separate-company financial statements, monthly management reports and a CSRD sustainability report are all produced in the same system, some in both Finnish and English, with built-in checks that keep the numbers consistent.
When all the numbers come straight from source, the reliability and speed are key benefits of a system like this.
Janne Siltanen, Accounting Manager, Group Accounting and Reporting, Metsä Group
Metsä Group is a Finnish forest industry group owned by some 90,000 Finnish forest owners.
Janne Siltanen, who consolidates and reports Metsä Board, has spent around seven years at Metsä Group in external and internal reporting, after a long spell at food company Apetit and nearly a decade as an auditor at PwC.
The reporting volumes are substantial. The financial statements run to around 200 pages, of which the sustainability section alone now accounts for roughly 70 pages within the report of the board of directors. Several reports are produced in two languages, which adds up to a great many pages to manage.
Before 2022, the situation was one many finance teams will recognize. “All the reporting was based on Excels and Words as separate files,” Siltanen says. An Excel add-in could pull figures from consolidation into spreadsheets, so that part was automated, but the report itself was then assembled from the various Excel and Word files. There were many manual steps, meaning copy-paste and keying, which are error-prone. A small detail that many can relate to is the stress of manual page and note numbering. The result was a board version that looked poor.
The move to CDM changed the model. Figures still come from the consolidation system, where actuals, estimates, budgets and a three-year forecast are held at company, mill and main product-category level. CDM maintains the reports on top of that data, with version control, role-based access defining who can see and edit what, and validation formulas that confirm the figures stay consistent across the report. The finished report, whether an interim report, an annual report or a monthly management report, is then generated straight out of the system.
Metsä Group and Metsä Board publish interim reports in Finnish and English each quarter. A single Group interim report is touched actively by, for example, one person from group accounting, two from communications, one or two from the sustainability team, one from the finance department, and four from the sub-group communications functions, before being distributed to a large group in management.
The team produces full IFRS financial statements for three sub-groups, one of them the listed company, plus the Group that consolidates everything. For Group and Board, the English does not have to be finished entirely in CDM, because a printed version is laid out by a communications agency; the English master is maintained in CDM while the Finnish is completed there and goes to the board for signing as a polished result.
CDM also handles the financial statements of about ten separate Finnish limited companies, maintained by four to five accounting-service staff who also handle bookkeeping tasks and tax filings for the same companies. Monthly management reports are produced for Board and Group in a single language, and the team maintains one automated slide deck as well.
Notably, Metsä Group produced a CSRD sustainability report through CDM in 2023, a year before it was mandatory. “We were one of the only companies in Finland that reported a sustainability report under the new standards a year early,” Siltanen says. It was included within the CDM report of the board of directors.
The first reports were built together with Intito. “Intito did the groundwork with us, and then once we started to learn how the system works, we finished the reports ourselves, and after that we could create reports from start to finish on our own,” Siltanen says. As he puts it, once you can build one report, you can build more.
Intito’s role in the project extended well beyond the initial build. As Metsä Group’s reporting requirements grew, from IFRS financial statements to management reports and ultimately to CSRD sustainability reporting, Intito provided both the technical depth and the working partnership to keep pace.
“Working with Intito, we were able to focus on what the reports needed to say rather than on how to build and maintain the system. Their deep knowledge of Certent Disclosure Management meant we could move faster and with more confidence than we expected. When tricky issues come up, we know exactly who to call,” Janne Siltanen says.
Around 85% of all the figures going into the various reports are automated, mostly from consolidation. Another 10% come through Excel templates, largely because Treasury runs its own systems and produces data into Excel, which is then copy-pasted into CDM’s Excel templates. “It doesn’t take long, and the numbers come through correctly,” Siltanen says. The sustainability side is automated to a similar level, and that share is set to rise next year, to the point where Excel templates are barely needed.
Beyond automation, Siltanen highlights convenient language-version maintenance across Finnish and English, reliable page numbering and tables of contents (a note-heading change can flow automatically into the contents list), and a large number of validation formulas. “We try to create a validation formula almost everywhere we can think of,” he says, so that primary statements reconcile with the notes and tables check horizontally and vertically. Shared files let a paragraph common to the financial statements bulletin and the report of the board of directors copy across automatically. Roll-forward functions make setting up a new year, quarter or month straightforward, mark-up versions track what changed before a board meeting, and role and rights limits keep each contributor to their own sections.
Siltanen is candid about the challenges too. Occasionally, in the large financial statements, a language switch from Finnish to English does not apply, or an internal CDM check variable freezes and shows a difference where none exists; in both cases the team knows how to force the freeze out. Importantly, this has never affected figures brought directly from source, only CDM’s internal variables and cache.
The other common challenge applies to any system, Siltanen notes: accounting-service staff who use CDM only once a year, to produce the financial statements, may not feel confident changing the underlying templates and check logic, so colleagues who use the system every quarter and month step in to help. “If you log into a system once a year, it doesn’t feel familiar right away.”
With consolidation as the data backbone, the move to Certent Disclosure Management met the demands of scale, accuracy, language and regulation at once. When 85% of figures flow in automatically, when language versions stay in step, and when a CSRD sustainability report can be produced a year ahead of the mandate, the finance team gains time to focus on what the numbers mean rather than on how to get them onto the page. That is the measure of a reporting infrastructure that genuinely works.
Metsä Group is a Finnish forest industry group, with parent company Metsäliitto Cooperative owned by more than 90,000 Finnish forest owners. The group comprises Metsä Forest (wood supply and forest services), Metsä Fibre (pulp and sawn timber), Metsä Board (paperboard, listed on Nasdaq Helsinki), Metsä Tissue (tissue and greaseproof papers) and Metsä Wood (wood products), together with Other Operations. You can read more about Metsä Group here.