Croatian Telecom reduced forecasting time by 30% and planning consolidation time by 80% with Farseer
About the Client
Croatian Telecom (Hrvatski Telekom) is Croatia’s leading telecommunications provider, offering fixed and mobile telephony, internet, wholesale, and data services. As part of Deutsche Telekom Group, the company serves millions of customers while employing nearly 5,000 people and generating more than €1 billion in annual revenue.
Operating across four legal entities with multiple service models, Croatian Telecom runs one of the country’s most complex financial planning environments. Every quarter, more than 70 planners collaborate on budgets and forecasts spanning over 18,000 revenue orders, making efficient planning critical to the business.
1B EUR annual revenue
5000 employees
70+ planners
4 legal entities
18,000+ revenue orders
From spreadsheet management to planning transformation
As Croatian Telecom’s business expanded, so did the complexity of its planning process.
Each quarterly planning cycle required finance to generate and consolidate approximately 50 spreadsheet input sheets for every planner. Different revenue models across business segments made consolidation slow and cumbersome, while even small changes to planning assumptions required manual updates across every spreadsheet.
The allocation process alone took up to eight hours, while controllers relied heavily on emails and phone calls to coordinate planning activities across multiple companies and business units.
Meanwhile, the business itself was becoming increasingly dynamic.
Market conditions changed faster, management required more frequent forecasts, and finance was expected to provide deeper insights—not simply consolidate spreadsheets.
"Business dynamics are becoming faster and faster. Companies need to react more quickly, and finance needs to provide better support for decision-making. That's why planning transformation has become one of our key priorities."
Croatian Telecom realized that improving spreadsheets was no longer enough. The company needed a centralized planning platform capable of supporting continuous planning, faster decision-making, and collaboration across the entire organization.
Building a modern planning platform with Farseer
Croatian Telecom selected Farseer to modernize its Financial Planning & Analysis process while preserving the planning logic the business had developed over many years.
Farseer integrated with existing data sources, providing automated data loading and real-time financial information throughout the planning cycle.
The new solution centralized OPEX planning while supporting departmental and individual planning workflows. Custom revenue planning models were developed for different companies and business segments, allowing the platform to accommodate Croatian Telecom’s diverse service models and organizational structure.
Real-time P&L reporting enabled planners to compare planned and actual results instantly, while versioning, top-down planning, and what-if scenarios made forecasting significantly more agile.
Beyond financial planning, Croatian Telecom also introduced KPI reporting and operational metrics—including customer base reporting—giving finance and management a much broader view of business performance.
A collaborative implementation
The implementation was completed in just 3.5 months through close collaboration between Croatian Telecom’s finance team and Farseer’s consultants.
Rather than simply replacing spreadsheets, the project focused on redesigning the planning process itself.
Finance specialists and business users participated in workshops to map planning logic, define new workflows, and gradually build planning models inside Farseer. Because the implementation was iterative, users could continuously refine the solution as new requirements emerged.
"The implementation wasn't just about introducing new software. It was about understanding how people plan, translating that knowledge into the system, and improving the process together."
The project also benefited from an exceptionally capable finance team with a clear vision of how planning should work. Once equipped with the right platform, they were able to transform years of manual processes into a modern planning environment supported by an internal team of dedicated Farseer administrators.
Results
The impact of the project was immediate.
Financial allocations that previously required eight hours now take less than five minutes.
Quarterly forecasting and reporting was reduced from 10 days to fewer than two days.
More than 70 planners transitioned from disconnected spreadsheets to a centralized planning platform, eliminating countless manual activities while improving collaboration and transparency across the organization.
The result was a planning process that is faster, more reliable, and significantly easier to manage.
Key outcomes include:
- Allocation process reduced from 8 hours to under 5 minutes
- Quarterly forecasting and reporting reduced from 10 days to under 2 days
- 70+ planners transitioned from Excel to Farseer
- Centralized planning across 4 legal entities
- Automated P&L consolidation and reporting
- Real-time planning, versioning, and scenario analysis
- Single source of truth for planning data
- Reduced manual maintenance of spreadsheet models
- Improved collaboration across finance and business teams
Perhaps most importantly, finance shifted its focus away from collecting and consolidating data toward analyzing results and supporting better business decisions.
"Before, we spent most of our time collecting and preparing data. Today we can spend that time analyzing the business instead."
Great response from users
The transformation was quickly embraced across the finance organization.
"Farseer turned our dreams into reality. The tool is so intuitively easy to use that whoever logged in continued to use it. Farseer is a refreshment in terms of the ease of planning and reporting."
The intuitive user experience helped accelerate adoption across the organization while enabling planners to focus less on operating the tool and more on planning itself.
Expanding beyond financial planning
As Croatian Telecom became more familiar with Farseer’s flexibility, new use cases quickly emerged.
One of the first was ESG reporting.
Using the same platform, more than 200 employees across the company now contribute sustainability data that is consolidated into comprehensive ESG reports for Deutsche Telekom Group.
This demonstrated that the platform could serve not only as a financial planning solution, but also as a centralized environment for collecting, managing, and reporting enterprise-wide business data.
Looking ahead, Croatian Telecom continues to expand its planning capabilities.
Future phases include workforce planning, cash flow planning, and balance sheet planning, while finance is also exploring driver-based planning and the use of artificial intelligence to further improve forecasting and decision-making.
"Planning transformation doesn't stop with implementing a tool. We're now moving toward driver-based planning and looking at how AI can support even better planning in the future."
