How eurotrade has brought accounting to a 5-star level

The customer

eurotrade Flughafen München Handels-GmbH is a subsidiary of Flughafen München that specialises in retail and shopping. With around 700 employees , the company operates a total of 39 shops at Munich Airport with an area of 10,000 square metres. Alongside the typical duty free shops, a wide range of premium brands are also represented, such as Boss, Rolex, Hermès, Montblanc or Swarovski.

Flughafen München is not only Germany’s second largest airport, but is also the first airport in Europe to have been awarded the 5-star seal of quality by Skytrax . In light of this, eurotrade is also committed to offering its customers an outstanding shopping experience. Naturally, this also includes a service-oriented, smooth payment process.

The challenge

The majority of the transactions at Munich Airport are cashless. «Being able to offer international customers all the payment options they want is an important part of the premium shopping experience», says Nadja Kobets, Head of Finance at eurotrade, describing the company’s expectations. Alongside all the international credit cards (Visa Card, Master Card, Diners Card, American Express, etc.), there are now also payment solutions like Alipay, WeChat Pay or PayPal.

«When you also consider that with nearly 40 shops and opening times from 6am to 9pm, we can quickly be dealing with up to 13,000 transactions a day, you can imagine how much work it has been for the eurotrade accounting team to match these payments with transaction accuracy», adds Nadja Kobets, summarising the basic situation.

«You also have to remember that the contract models for the different cashless payment methods vary widely: it’s not only the different fees that have to be taken into account. When the payments are credited also differs depending on the payment provider.» All in all, a huge amount of manual work.

«At eurotrade, we insist on our 5-star quality standard being reflected in the company’s internal processes too», explains Nadja Kobets. Accordingly, we decided to digitise the processes involved in reconciling electronic transactions. The goal was to raise the quality of accounting to a new level.

In addition to the challenges already mentioned, there were also some specific requirements that had to be met in the airport context.

«One example is dynamic currency conversion (DCC)», explains Nadja Kobets. This allows customers to decide at the card terminal whether they want to pay in euros or in their home currency. The possible earnings from the currency conversion have to be considered for correct posting entries.

The solution

Once eurotrade had gained an overview of the potential software solutions on the market, it then sought appropriate quotes, taking into account the special challenges that have to be overcome. After carefully analysing the different providers, the company chose the electronic payment reconciliation and analytics software Matchbox from treibauf.

The software imports all cash register and acquirer data, reconciles this in a fully automated process, then automatically creates the right posting entries and exports these to eurotrade’s connected ERP. The system is also so flexible and modular that it was easy to accommodate eurotrade’s special requirements (e.g. DCC) with individual adjustments.

If new (pop-up) stores are added to the existing portfolio, for example, the high flexibility allows these to be integrated into Matchbox with ease. Both the earnings from dynamic currency conversion and the transaction fees are not only displayed automatically: they can also be precisely assigned to individual stores.

The result

«Before we used Matchbox, we had a completely different way of working, which tied up a vast amount of valuable resources. Now Matchbox takes care of the time-consuming groundwork, reconciles most transactions fully automatically every two hours and also posts the correct matches straight away», reports Nadja Kobets.

What percentage of payments are matched fully automatically? «We’re lucky that we get data promptly and it’s usually very accurate. After three weeks we’re already achieving a matching rate of 98 % to 99 %!»

«Our team is still in demand, of course: now we can concentrate very specifically on the few transactions that are not posted fully automatically. This means we can massively increase the quality of our reconciliation – and make far better use of our colleagues’ skills», says Nadja Kobets, explaining her experience with the software.

«A colleague can now finally go on holiday in December, for example, because there’s far less rectification work now we’re using Matchbox. No wonder then that the software is also getting a lot of positive feedback in the team.»

«The benefits from my perspective? Far less manual work for our accounting team, fewer errors and the good feeling that we’ve been able to raise the quality of our bookkeeping to a 5-star level with Matchbox», says Nadja Kobets, summarising the benefits of Matchbox from her perspective. But that is by no means all: «Because the data from Matchbox can even be broken down into individual cost centres, controlling benefits from unprecedented transparency!»