NHS
Case Study
NHS Group was using DATEV for compliance but relied on manual Excel work for any consulting-grade reporting, multilingual output, or multi-currency analysis. This was slow, error-prone, and hard to scale. They implemented Apliqo FPM alongside DATEV, which reduced setup time, enabled on-demand multilingual reports (including Japanese), and gave clients direct self-service access to their financial data.
NHS
A case study published by Apliqo describing how German tax advisory firm NHS Group adopted the Apliqo FPM platform to overcome reporting limitations in their existing DATEV compliance setup.
Products used
Apliqo FPM
Solutions
Financial Reporting, Management Reporting, Multi-Currency Reporting, Multilingual Reporting, Self-Service Analytics
Jan Renziehausen
Partner Business Consulting
NHS Group, a leading German tax advisory and audit firm, serves a client base that includes international investors, private equity firms, and Japanese holding companies — clients who expect investor-grade reporting, in any language, on demand.
Their existing compliance platform handled the regulatory work well. The reporting flexibility their consulting clients required was another matter entirely.
Every new engagement meant rebuilding custom Excel models from scratch. For a firm where 40% of clients required Japanese-language financials, the manual effort was unsustainable.
With Apliqo, NHS Group reduced client onboarding from days to under an hour, enabled on-demand reporting in German, English, and Japanese from a single data source, and gave clients direct access to drill down from summary reports to individual transactions — without involving the advisory team.
NHS's challenge wasn't a lack of data —
it was a lack of flexibility. DATEV handled compliance beautifully, but the moment a client asked for an English-language report, a custom KPI dashboard, or a Japanese-translated financial statement, the firm hit a wall.
DATEV required users to choose a reporting language at setup, and switching wasn't an option. Multilingual reporting simply wasn't feasible.
So NHS turned to Excel. For every client engagement, the team would export data from DATEV — sometimes as standard reports, sometimes as trial balances, and for complex multi-entity groups, as raw transaction-level data.
Then they'd build custom reporting templates from the ground up. The process was labor-intensive, taking days of setup time per client. Worse, it was fragile: Excel formulas were easy to break, version control was a nightmare, and scaling to handle consolidated group reporting was nearly impossible.
For NHS's Japan Desk, the problem was even more acute. With 40% of their clients tied to Japanese holding companies, the firm regularly needed to deliver financial reports in Japanese.
DATEV couldn't do it. Excel could, but only with significant manual effort and constant maintenance. And when clients had follow-up questions — why did this expense spike in March? what's driving this KPI? — the NHS team had to manually dig into the data and respond, often with a 24-hour delay due to time zone differences.
The firm needed a solution that could preserve DATEV's compliance strengths while unlocking the reporting flexibility their consulting clients expected.
They needed standardization, speed, and self-service analytics — all without starting from scratch every time.
When NHS discovered Apliqo, they immediately saw the potential to bridge the gap between compliance and consulting. Apliqo's platform integrated seamlessly with DATEV via a simple text-based export, and more importantly, it offered something NHS had never had before: out-of-the-box reporting standards that could be deployed in minutes, then customized as needed.
The implementation process was remarkably fast. For a new client using DATEV's standard chart of accounts (SKR03 or SKR04), the NHS team could set up a complete Apliqo environment in just 10 to 15 minutes. They'd configure the DATEV interface, import the data, and immediately start generating reports using Apliqo's pre-built templates — including statutory HGB-compliant financials and management reports with EBITDA, cash flow, and custom KPIs. For clients with unique reporting requirements, the team could customize dashboards and reports in another hour or two. What used to take days now took half a day at most.
But the real transformation was in how reports were delivered and consumed. With Apliqo, NHS could generate the same financial data in multiple languages and currencies on the fly — no rebuilding required. A German statutory report could instantly become an English management report or a Japanese investor package, all from the same underlying data. Clients were given direct access to Apliqo's user interface, where they could drill down from high-level report lines into account-level detail and even individual transactions — all without calling the NHS team.
For NHS, this meant their consulting engagements shifted from reactive data delivery to proactive advisory. Instead of fielding basic questions about what's in the numbers, the team could focus on what the numbers mean and what actions clients should take. And because Apliqo sat alongside DATEV rather than replacing it, NHS maintained full compliance integrity while unlocking unprecedented reporting flexibility.
The impact was immediate and measurable.
Setup time reduced by 90%+: What used to take days of Excel development now takes 10-15 minutes for standard reporting, and half a day for fully customized solutions
Multilingual reporting unlocked: Clients can now receive reports in German, English, Japanese, or any other language, generated on demand from the same data source.
Self-service analytics: Clients can drill from report lines down to individual transactions without waiting for NHS to respond, eliminating 24-hour delays and freeing up consulting capacity.
Error reduction: Standardized reporting templates replaced fragile, formula-heavy Excel files, dramatically reducing the risk of reporting errors.
Faster insights: Questions that used to require back-and-forth emails and manual analysis are now answered instantly by clients themselves, accelerating decision-making
NHS has transformed from a firm constrained by its tools into one empowered by them, delivering a best-in-class client experience that scales effortlessly.
