More efficient reporting and budgeting at Skanska

Skanska AB is one of the world's leading project developers and construction groups, headquartered in Stockholm. Founded in Malmö in 1887, Skanska today operates across the Nordics, the rest of Europe and the United States.

The finance function works with reporting and forecasting across multiple countries, currencies and business units — placing high demands on structure, traceability and control in the financial model.

Skanska had built up extensive reporting in Excel, with forecasting driven by advanced VBA scripts. The number of reports was deliberately kept small — each new report meant more code to maintain, more versions to keep track of and a higher risk of errors.

At the same time, the need for new views on the data was growing faster than the Excel setup could keep up with. The team did not want to keep expanding a solution that locked them to a specific Excel version and became harder to maintain with every additional report.

Skanska today uses Exopen Report and Exopen Planning. Together they cover both day-to-day reporting and the forecasting and planning workflow, all gathered in a single portal where users find everything in one place.

A handful of more complex reports store forecast data per project and business unit, alongside simpler reports for daily use. The VBA code is gone, version control is centralised and the Excel client can be upgraded without breaking the reports.

Since go-live, Skanska has extended the solution in several steps. Reporting is now published across multiple countries, with support for currency hedging in Europe, and the system is also used for non-financial reports where end users can trigger operations directly from the report interface.

In practice, finance and system owners can update approval rules, maintain registers, set permissions and lock versions — without switching between separate tools. The result, in Skanska's own words, is a clear gain in both time and money.