How Vaillant uses thinkcell to streamline consistent financial reporting

About Vaillant

The Vaillant Group is an internationally active family-owned business based in Remscheid, Germany. The global market leader in central hydronic heating units celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2024. It offers its customers technologies for heating, cooling and hot-water supply that contribute to successfully shaping the energy transition in the buildings sector. The focus is on eco-friendly electric heat pumps, efficient gas-fired boilers, intelligent systems and comprehensive services.

The Vaillant Group employs 16,000 people worldwide, including more than 800 in research and development, serves around 30 million customers, and has more than 340,000 installation partners.

Ruben Latz, Manager Finance Project and Transition of Vaillant Group Business Services, started working at the Vaillant Group in 2017, which is also when he first encountered thinkcell. He was quick to see the benefits and he’s never looked back since, with thinkcell now an integral part of his consistent financial reporting workflows.

Financial reporting challenges at global enterprises

For companies like the Vaillant Group that run complex, global operations, financial reporting needs to fulfil several criteria to be effective:

• Digestible: The large volumes of data in the Vaillant Group’s Business Warehouse need transforming into clear, high-level aggregations so that management can quickly consume the most important information.
• Insightful: Financial reporting is valuable when it goes beyond simply showing metrics to include additional commentary into causes, impacts and conclusions.
• Fast: Speed is a key element of creating value given the significant number and variety of financial reports enterprises like the Vaillant Group create.
• Flexible: Analysts can respond more efficiently to management requests when they can access, analyze and visualize data independently.
• Reliable: Financial reporting includes KPIs that drive critical business decisions, which makes data accuracy a non-negotiable for a company like the Vaillant Group.

In the following, we’ll look more closely at how Ruben Latz uses thinkcell to ensure the Vaillant Group’s financial reporting ticks each of these boxes.

How thinkcell boosts productivity of daily financial reporting tasks

A big part of Ruben’s role at the Vaillant Group is building ad-hoc reports that look at financial data from different perspectives. This involves several steps: understanding the requirements, importing the data from the Vaillant Group’s Business Warehouse into Excel, building appropriate visualizations and providing commentary to explain his findings.

By using thinkcell, Ruben can greatly speed up the visualization part of this process. He can choose the columns and rows he needs, and his charts will update accordingly. “For me, it’s important that I can transport the key message of a slide in a way that’s easily accessible to the audience. And with thinkcell I can do this efficiently, quickly, and to a high standard,” he explains.

Ruben’s streamlined workflow lets him respond flexibly to requests. By using thinkcell’s automations to reduce manual work, he frees up more time to add value to his financial reporting presentations with expert analysis.

The dashboard gives him a clear single-slide overview and helps him easily understand project status. “I can organize everything very clearly. And then it’s easy to refresh the dashboard and keep my standardized layout,” he demonstrates. Watch the video to see Ruben’s thinkcell dashboard in action with a financial report example.

How thinkcell helps uncover insights in large datasets

Like any global enterprise, the Vaillant Group’s financial operations are built on large amounts of data. Ruben’s work as an analyst sees him collating raw data and transforming it into a workable structure in Excel. From the spreadsheet, he then spins up thinkcell column and waterfall charts to help inform the next stage of his analysis.

Quickly consumable charts make it easy to identify areas of interest and cut the time spent on high-level overviews. This gives Ruben the opportunity to dig deeper and create more insightful financial reports that can help drive business decisions.

How thinkcell improves the efficiency of financial reporting

While some reports require flexible, ad-hoc analysis, Ruben also works on regular monthly reports that track the Vaillant Group’s key financial metrics for their planning cycles. Reporting needs to be error-free, but it can be difficult to maintain consistency when compiling complex presentations with multiple charts, annotations and data-driven commentaries.

Ruben ensures consistency by using thinkcell to keep manual adjustments to a minimum. He automates his reports by establishing links not just to chart data ranges, but to every single cell that contains a value he needs. In this way, thinkcell’s Excel links help Ruben generate his reports faster, while also guaranteeing 100% accuracy.

Watch the video to see how Ruben Latz updates his monthly financial reports with thinkcell.

The future of the Vaillant Group and thinkcell

One reason thinkcell has served the Vaillant Group so well over the years is the companies’ shared commitment to innovation. Discussing the thinkcell Library, released in January 2025, Ruben can see the potential of its templates for his upcoming projects.

For his future work with thinkcell, Ruben also plans to work more closely with the thinkcell tab, another feature available since January 2025. The standard thinkcell tab makes all the most important features available in one place, but Ruben envisages further productivity boosts from adjusting it to his own workflows.

That’s the future, but even today thinkcell is firmly embedded in Ruben’s work at the Vaillant Group, not just because he can benefit from time-saving automations, but because he can produce highly professional outputs that do justice to his data analysis.