How Piano Group built the financial reporting for a group of 9 companies on solid foundations right from day one

About Piano Group

Piano Group is a Czech tech group built by the investment group Miton, which is digitalizing the hospitality and gastronomy sector in the Czech Republic and Central Europe. The group brings together 9 companies: Septim Systems, Piano Payments (Qerko), Grason Solutions, POS Experts, ABX software, Cominn, protel systems, Pecosta, and Piano Solutions, offering restaurant and hotel operators a complete ecosystem of tools: from POS systems and payments to HR, and from purchasing ingredients to hotel software.

Through Piano’s systems, transactions totaling over 36 billion CZK flow annually from more than 6,000 locations, around 17% of the total value of transactions in the Czech gastronomy market. The group was created by merging 9 operational companies across more than ten accounting units.

What Piano Group has gained	Key benefits
One source of truth for the whole group of 9 financial plans and actuals in one platform Plan vs. actuals in just a few clicks, no Excel Non-financial users can see their budgets separately	Decisions made based on the same real-time data 9 entities connected in 14 days without ERP replacement Scalability solved: adding another entity or plan in a few hours Group consolidation automatically, no waiting

The situation when the group was formed

When Piano Group was getting started, it faced a major decision: how to organize the group’s overall financial reporting. From previous experience, the finance team knew Excel well, but they were also fully aware of its limitations when working in a group setting.

Manually consolidating and controlling multiple accounting agendas in Excel would be extremely time-consuming, and as the group grew, the situation would only get worse. The same problem would arise with financial planning: managing separate Excel plans and then comparing them to actual results would be complicated and prone to errors. That’s why, from day one, Piano Group was looking for a solution that would prevent these problems.

Why Piano Group Chose Symfio

Symfio met the three key requirements Piano Group had when choosing a platform:

1. Simple and quick implementation

Thanks to Symfio’s native connector for the Pohoda accounting system, connecting all 9 companies was a matter of weeks, not months. The entire implementation, including full account mapping and linking financial plans, was completed in 14 days without data migration and without changing existing accounting procedures.

• Pohoda connector: data is downloaded automatically every day, with no manual exports.
• Pohoda remained untouched: Symfio works as an add-on, not a replacement for the accounting system.
• 14 days from start to live operation: including connecting all 9 entities and importing 9 financial plans.

Planning and Reporting in One Place

For Piano Group, it was crucial that financial plans and actual results exist on the same platform. The alternative, managing 9 Excel plans and then manually comparing them with actuals from accounting systems, would have been laborious and prone to errors.

• 9 financial plans in Symfio: plans for all entities imported during implementation.
• Plan vs. actual in a few clicks: management immediately sees how actual results differ from the plan.
• Group consolidated plan: alongside individual entities, there’s also a consolidated view for the whole group.

One source of truth for the whole team

The key requirement was that all team members, from the CFO to department heads to the board, work with the same data at the same time. Excel doesn’t meet this requirement by nature: there are always multiple versions, and some are always outdated.

• Everyone sees the same data: the finance team, department heads, and the board all work from a single source.
• Immediate decision-making: management can respond to current data right after it’s posted.
• Non-financial users: department heads can see their budgets directly without the help of an accountant.