Ein Business Plan, drei Teams: ein VBA-Modell öffnen, ohne es zu ersetzen
Wie ein fünfköpfiges Finance-Team aufhörte, der Engpass des eigenen Business Plans zu sein, und Investment Memoranda nun in zwei Stunden erstellt.
Diese Übersetzung wurde maschinell erstellt und noch nicht von einem Muttersprachler geprüft.
What happened
A five-person finance team ran every financial model for a project cluster through one Excel business plan built on VBA macros and hosted on SharePoint. It was the backbone of every investment decision and it was inaccessible to everyone else, so the whole load sat with finance. Development and sales now work from the same model through their own interfaces, and a complete investment memorandum takes two hours instead of several days.
The bottleneck was structural, not technical
The business plan worked. The problem was that only finance could open it. Every update and every output extraction went through five people, which produced delay on a good day and desync on a bad one, because development was working from static copies.
Sales had no structured outputs at all. And each investment committee needed a full IM written by hand from the model: financial summary, assumptions, sensitivities, project narrative. Several days of finance time per deal. As deal volume grew, that stopped being an irritation and became a ceiling on how many projects the business could look at.
What we built
We did not replace the business plan. Replacing a working VBA model is how you lose two years and the trust of the people who built it. Instead we put a layer of interfaces on top of it, each exposing only what one team needs.
Finance keeps everything: the full model, the macros, every assumption and sensitivity, all outputs, the complete IM and the committee dashboards.
Development gets a structured input list, costs, schedule and technical assumptions, and sees targeted profitability indicators back: NPV, IRR, DSCR.
Sales gets read-only commercial outputs, sale price, margin and customer scenarios, with no access to the macros or the model's structure.
The investment memorandum, generated
The IM is produced from the model rather than transcribed out of it: executive summary with description, location, capacity and development stage; key assumptions across CAPEX, OPEX, revenues and discount rate; NPV, equity IRR, DSCR, payback and sensitivities; risk analysis and watch points; and a narrative structure written for the way a committee actually reads.
The result
| Before | With Nepsis | |
|---|---|---|
| IM drafting time | Several days, manual | Two hours, generated |
| Teams autonomous on the model | Finance only | Finance, development, sales |
| Desync risk | High, static copies | None, single source |
| Output request response time | One to three days | Instant, self-service |
| VBA model integrity | Fragile, multiple copies | Preserved, controlled access |
| Capacity for more projects | Limited by finance bandwidth | Scales without extra load |
Our business plan was a black box for everyone but us. With Nepsis the development team fills in their inputs autonomously, sales gets their outputs in real time, and we deliver a complete IM for committee in two hours. Finance got time back to do real analysis.
CFO, renewable energy developer
The operational win is the two hours. The strategic win is that unblocking finance lets the organisation analyse more projects, go to committee more often, and document its decisions better.