IMMY integrates Phocas with Infor ERP achieving major budget and reporting efficiency gains

IMMY is an American manufacturer of fungal diagnostic tests, dedicated to helping people globally in the early detection and prevention of fungal infections.

The manufacturer runs its business on Infor CloudSuite Industrial (SyteLine) ERP which was installed in 2019. As growth hit and the company started getting traction, it was evident that IMMY needed better visibility of financial performance across all its operations.

Devin Moxley, the financial controller started when the company had 40 employees. As of 2025, Immy has 100 staff members and operates in 7 countries. The finance team has played a key role in supporting the business' growth and development.

"The tools that come with Infor are not great for financial reporting and suddenly we had to produce more reports more often. Given my team's workload, we considered hiring additional staff to address the reporting issue or adding a different tool to potentially save costs,"explains Devin.

Devin and his team discovered that by integrating Phocas Financial Statements and Budgets and Forecasts with the Infor CloudSuite Industrial (SyteLine) ERP, they were able to create management reports, produce multi-entity reporting for the board, auditors and banks in the lead up to an acquisition and significantly revamp the manufacturer’s complex budget process.

“Our budget is live for more days as a direct result of Phocas and we are confident to make important structural changes within our business knowing we have reliable reporting tools. The ROI from Phocas is we can do more value-add tasks, resulting in improved efficiency and daily monitoring,” says Devin.

Relying solely on the finance team for manual reporting is unsustainable, especially during growth

The old style of reporting was dependent on the finance team. And when everyone is relying on one team it is hard to satisfy everyone and be flexible.

“We're growing super quickly. We have all these new reporting requirements. Suddenly, I'm hammering my team saying get this done faster. They're making mistakes because it's all in a manual spreadsheet,”says Devin.

“And these were the tools that we paid consultants a lot of money to assist us with after implementing Infor CloudSuite. We thought we had the right tools but there continued to be extra work,”says Devin.

The finance team tried using Power BI to build an accounts payable and an accounts receivable tool and the intention was to do this for all the financial statements.

To pull reports from the Infor CloudSuite ERP, Devin explained it was necessary to also extract data using Excel formulas. He likes working in Excel but building reports creates large spreadsheets.

"This workaround method was a problem. For one cell in the report, it references eight different cells. And if there's any structural change to the GL, the unit codes or the periods then this entire formula has to be edited."

"Our CFO who is technical with an IT background also found the manual processes to be cumbersome. And the CEO is a microbiology PhD. He loves data and if we’d present a financial report one way, he'll also want to view another way. If you want to make a change when using a spreadsheet, it just takes too long."

Devin and the CFO would go to Sun Infor conference and ask about the Infor reporting tools (actually lots of people would ask about the reports) and they always get the same answer – ‘you are using the right tools’.

“And it seemed like everyone was putting up with this crummy situation for reporting.” says Devin.

And what about departmental budgeting being difficult too

Devin used Infor and Power BI/Excel for departmental budgets but found these tools unsuitable for detailed business planning.

Devin highlighted the back and forth required to update the departmental budgets in Excel and pass this back into the Infor ERP. “Again it was a four-step process for every single change.” He was also wary about sharing the budget with the Vice Presidents whom he likes to collaborate with but when they made changes, this would also mess up the formulas.

“I can't create a budget in Power BI/Excel. If I do, I have to create in one sheet, in one place. And then Power BI needs to reference each budget sheet so someone in finance needs to maintain each budget because it contains sensitive and important data."

This error prone system took time to update and then fix. Yet the finance team still knew they were not reflecting the current business experience and were letting the other team members down. Devin didn’t like hearing, “I thought we’d budgeted for this change to happen in March and now it's April.”

This inefficiency led Devin to seek an external reporting, budgeting and forecasting tool.

An external FP&A solution that integrates with Infor CloudSuite ERP

Finding Phocas was easy. Devin did some online research and came across Phocas that integrates with Infor ERPs and had the functionality that IMMY required. He also considered hiring another person but didn't want to put someone on to continue to wrangle spreadsheets – he wanted to improve the reporting and budgeting.

“Prior to finding Phocas I had this hesitation whenever somebody asked me for financial statements, despite it being my job. Whereas everything is easier now, we can group accounts how people want them. Phocas provides a robust financial reporting tool that I can change but can't break,”says Devin.

“Performing these fundamental financial tasks is generally not possible for CloudSuite Infor customers unless they are using Phocas,” adds Devin.

“However, the best advantage alongside fast and customized financial statements is the up-to-date data that I can put into the budget and run it right next to actuals. And it’s also a quick forecast tool,”says Devin.

“Our annual budget process is totally revamped. It is so much faster and the software has the functionality to securely delegate it to other people,’ adds Devin.

“I can now quickly check changes and compare them to the previous year. Previously, we experienced bottlenecks where we had to gather all the data, make necessary changes, and then publish on specific dates.

“Throughout our two-month budgeting process, there were only four or five days when the budget was accurately up-to-date. Last year, I monitored changes daily, which meant that instead of having five days in a 60-day period, I had at least 30 days within a 45-day period to track progress.

We have significantly increased the number of days our budget is live. This major operational change was entirely due to Phocas. We’re getting more things done and everything is faster and more functional.” says Devin.

“We can check our budgets and update our forecasts and work alongside our team and use the information to save costs and make other improvements.

A recent operational change was deciding to split quality assurance and quality control into two separate divisions. Quality control is more related to manufacturing whereas quality assurance is related to a business’ regulatory needs. If they didn’t have Phocas, the finance team would not have been willing to support this structural change because it would have added more work. With Phocas I feel comfortable creating another budget for quality control and adapting the other for quality assurance and running those budgets into our actuals,” says Devin.

“And our management team feels confident that we're going to support the new division with the necessary reporting and budget allocations because we have Phocas,” adds Devin.

More time for the finance team to focus on acquisitions and growth

Devin now has more time to review the performance figures in the financial statements.Last year IMMY acquired OLM Diagnostics, based in the UK. According to Devin, Phocas played a significant role in this process by assisting his team in providing timely and accurate financial statements, which helped secure the sale.

"We had numerous demands at that time, and we were able to meet them thanks to Phocas. We conducted due diligence to determine whether it was financially viable for IMMY to acquire this company."

Using Phocas we quickly did many scenario plans to determine outcomes if sales didn’t meet our expectations. We'd compare lower figures against actuals and the budget. I’d be able to do this very quickly in a room full of people. Then they would want to make changes so I’d change the forecast values and update. With a spreadsheet, everyone would have to send me their ‘what-ifs’ and then take me a week to provide estimates.

To picture the numbers working behind these potential scenarios, Devin has 15 departmental budgets set-up in Phocas with extra layers by product and location built-in. They can be reviewed separately or all consolidated to one reporting level. In Phocas, all these levels are structurally safe and Devin can collaborate with the four vice presidents as they have permissions, and he can see when changes are made.

“Phocas has successfully met our objectives and we are looking for other ways to expand our business.”