CASE STUDY

How Waste4Change elevated gross margin by 20% through optimized financial management with Bunker

  • Waste4Change is a leader in waste management and recycling in Indonesia, currently managing more than 8,000 tons of waste annually 
  • The Company has raised over USD5 million in Series A and has 200+ employees
  • W4C serves more than 200 clients, including global brands such as DBS, IKEA, Australian Embassy, BASF, and Amazon among others

Streamlined operations with time-savings

Freed up 40+ man hours on a monthly basis with increased efficiency

Enhanced visibility

Built direct visibility to 12000 rows of General Ledger data across 150+ accounts and 4 entities

Elevated Gross Margins

Gained 20% boost in margins with strategic changes and business restructuring

The Challenge

Time-intensive accounting processes

Challenged visibility into financial data given mass volume

Inefficient cost management across entities

As a social enterprise committed to responsible waste management, Waste4Change has made significant strides in reducing the amount of waste that ends up in landfills. However, as the company expanded, it struggled with substantial challenges in managing its financial data.

Time-Intensive Accounting Processes

Waste4Change's finance team found themselves mired in time-consuming accounting processes. Every month, the team would manually extract and aggregate its financial data across multiple entities for management to analyze the business and generate strategic insights.

The process being manual, did not only impact the quality of the insights but slowed down the overall time-to-insights for the company to more than two weeks.

Moreover, the team spent 40+ hours on a monthly basis to create standardized views for the insights

Limited Financial Data Visibility

Despite having an internal system of financial reports in the form of PowerPoint highlights and Excel sheets, the tools fell short of providing a comprehensive narrative of the business.

The finance team struggled to gain a clear view of their financial landscape, with limited visibility into their numbers. The management was only able to access insights from the150 row summary view of financials and was not able to explore the depths of 12000 rows of general ledger data across four entities.

This hindered their ability to make strategic decisions and communicate effectively with other stakeholders.

Inefficient Cost Management Across Entities

Waste4Change's growth also brought about the challenge of managing an increasing number of accounts and vendors. The company had 150+ accounts and 100+ vendors across its entities. For vendors, the company had to negotiate, track, and manage contracts on a regular basis.

However, having disjointed systems across entities, made it difficult to gain deep insights into vendor spend details and trends, especially at transaction level. This inefficiency in vendor management affected the company’s cash conversion cycles.

Bunker is like a very sharp knife that cuts through financial data to obtain detailed insights.

Mohamad Bijaksana Junerosano, CEO Waste4Change

The Solution: How Bunker Helped

Since 2022, Waste4Change has worked closely with Bunker to improve visibility of its finances to transaction level details, across all its entities.

Bunker's intelligent platform offered W4C a user-friendly dashboard that provided a deep dive into their expenses. This included an intuitive P&L dashboard that could be easily sorted by actuals and variances, arming the finance team with the insights they needed to make informed decisions.

“Bunker is like a very sharp knife that cuts through financial data to obtain detailed insights. Improving our gross margin by over 20% for one of our entities would only have been possible with the full financial visibility that Bunker provides. Now I can focus on the business without worrying about the numbers”, said Mohamad Bijaksana Junerosano, CEO Waste4Change.

As the Head of Finance and Accounting, Meydam Gusniar played a crucial role in the transformation of the financial practices at Waste4Change.

"Bunker has been a game-changer for us," said Meydam Gusniar. "We now have a comprehensive and accurate view of our financial landscape in a matter of minutes. It has revolutionised our approach to financial management and has fundamentally changed how we operate."

We now have a comprehensive and accurate view of our financial landscape in a matter of minutes

Meydam Gusniar, Head of Finance and Accounting, Waste4Change

Impact: Key Results

  • Boosted overall gross margin by 20% for one of the key entities 
  • Gained transaction-level visibility into 12000 rows of financials across 150+ accounts and 4 entities, through Bunker  
  • Reduced vendor count by 18% and vendor spend by 15% through strategic negotiations
  • Freed up 40+ hours on a monthly basis to create standardised views for insights  

With Bunker, Waste4Change was able to boost their gross margin by 20%, primarily by cutting the cost of revenue. This was achieved largely through renegotiating contracts with existing vendors. For example, the company cut 59.5% of 'Waste Credit' cost category alone. In their Material Trading division, Waste4Change reduced costs by 5.4% by streamlining the number of vendors and renegotiating spend with their top 10 vendors, saving them millions.

Moreover, the 40+ man hours saved each month by using Bunker had a transformative impact on Waste4Change's operations. The time saved allowed the management team to focus on core business areas, such as improving waste management services, developing new initiatives, and future growth strategies. It also freed up resources to engage more deeply with their community programs and educational initiatives, furthering their mission of responsible waste management.

In addition, Bunker advised Waste4Change on the necessity of separating entities based on their business nature and adjusting their accounting books to reflect their business model. This allowed Bunker to highlight recurring revenue and project-based revenue, as well as categorise expenses accordingly.

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