How Matchbox lightens the load for Accounting and IT at the same time

The customer

The family company Bächli Bergsport brings nature, people and material together with a focus on sustainability. Since being founded in 1974, the goal of the Swiss mountain sport pioneer has not altered to this day: to make really good equipment available to other mountaineers. Bächli now has 13 branches and an online shop providing everything that committed alpinists, summit lovers and beginners need, in order to explore the mountains safely and happily.

The challenge

Bächli has been using part of the modular Matchbox solution since 2004: to date, however, the software has only been used to bundle the different acquirer data and import it into the company’s ERP in channels. Payments were only being reconciled (i.e. matched) using a specially developed module within the ERP system, which was continually making a lot of work for IT.

«Over time we realised that we would be better served by the full Matchbox solution than by our custom development – especially as we had vastly underestimated the work involved in operating our own matching solution», says Alexander Künzler, Computer Scientist at Bächli Bergsport, summarising the IT department’s findings.

Another goal was to make life easier for Accounting by using the matching function, as the application is much easier and more intuitive to use – and can be operated with hardly any help from IT. In this context it was also about simplifying bank reconciliation for Accounting.

The solution

In 2022 the time had come: in the course of implementing the new ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Bächli Bergsport decided to switch all matching processes over to Matchbox from treibauf.

After the concept and the project plan were agreed in a joint kick-off meeting with treibauf, Accounting was directly involved in the ongoing planning: Matchbox ultimately had to be configured and implemented so that the tool makes the team’s daily work routine as easy as possible.

The team was able to take advantage of existing structures for the modular expansion of the software: Bächli supplies all ERP transaction data (both from the POS and the online shop) to the Matchbox software via the SFTP server. Rather than all the acquirer data, however, the already ‘matched’ data is now imported into Microsoft Dynamics 365 via the FTP server. The algorithms and matching levels were optimised in this regard – so reconciliation now works much more reliably.

Incidentally, Bächli is not currently using the Matchbox function that automatically creates posting entries from the matched data: account assignment is executed within the ERP’s Microsoft Dynamics.

After development, configuration, testing, documentation and implementation, on 01/04/2022 the time had come: the new matching functionality was rolled out across the whole of Bächli Bergsport. The solution has reliably been matching all electronic payment data from the 13 branches and the online shop ever since.

The result

«Thanks to Matchbox, Accounting can reconcile payments much more easily and efficiently than with the previous solution – namely with almost no support from our IT department. The software is easy to use, takes a lot of work off our hands and is precisely tailored to our needs. We now have a tried-and-tested, clear and sophisticated solution that provides our Accounting department with optimal support throughout the entire reconciliation process», says Alexander Künzler, getting to the heart of the added value the solution brings for Bächli Bergsport.

Besides the simplification of processes, Alexander Künzler also sees the cross-departmental transparency and clarity created by the new solution as a major benefit: «Since we’ve been using Matchbox, there have simply been no more frictional losses and misunderstandings between Accounting and IT.» With Matchbox’s intuitive user interface, Accounting can now monitor the matching independently and make manual adjustments where necessary.

What’s more, bank reconciliation also works much better, easier and more reliably now: the Bächli accounting clerks can now see at a glance whether the reconciliation is correct – and without time-consuming reconciliation work.