How connexta, a fast-growing German IT group, brought 21 companies and their tax adviser into one shared digital process

Exchanging documents and information across a group of companies, securely and on time, is a challenge for any finance team, and it grows with every new entity. connexta is a buy-and-build IT group that has grown quickly to 21 companies, with new companies joining every year.

Each year, the group’s corporate tax returns are prepared together with their external tax adviser, Ypsilon. With 21 companies, that means coordinating a large volume of documents, queries and tasks between the central Finance team, the finance colleagues in each individual company, and the tax adviser, who needs access to data from every entity.

Like many growing groups, connexta had managed this work with Excel spreadsheets, emails and Teams channels. That worked well while the group was smaller. With every new company, though, the volume of requests and files grew, and connexta wanted one group-wide place to see what had been requested, what had been provided and who was responsible.

Security was just as important. Financial and tax data is highly sensitive, and with so many entities involved, any new system had to keep connexta’s strict access controls in place, so each person could only see the data for their own company, while the tax adviser had the full picture. The team also wanted to keep documents and answers from previous years together in one place, rather than spread across inboxes and external advisers.

The answer turned out to be one they already knew. During their annual financial statement audits, connexta’s finance team had been using Auditi with their external auditor for the structured exchange of documents, information and outstanding items. Head of Finance Stefan Lohr quickly saw that this way of working could add real value to connexta’s own finance processes too.

With Auditi, connexta runs one shared digital process. By combining a central data room with a structured to-do list, Auditi gives the central Finance team, the finance colleagues in each company and their tax adviser one workspace where everyone can see what is needed, from whom, and by when.

For connexta, the combination of easy collaboration, transparency and security matters most. Clear user rights at company level give connexta full control over who sees what, and Auditi’s hosting by DATEV gives the group the confidence it needs for sensitive financial and tax data. The platform also handles whatever the process requires: all common file types of up to 10GB in size can be uploaded without a second thought.

Just as importantly, the process scales with the group. When a new company joins connexta, it simply becomes another sub-project with its own users and access rights, following the same standardized process as every other entity. With documents and answers kept together year after year, connexta keeps its knowledge in-house and independent of any single external adviser.

Stefan is convinced that a fast-growing group needs systems it can grow with. Auditi is one example of how he is building connexta’s finance function on that principle.