Sesol: Billion-dollar enterprise with rocket growth bets on SEMINE

The Swedish solar energy company Sesol more than quadrupled its revenue in 2021-22, reaching SEK 1.4 billion. With SEMINE's help, one person alone can handle the company’s around 50,000 incoming invoices this year—with time to spare.

Pictured from left: Daniel Karlsen, CCO, Semine, Peter Gerward, Sales Executive, Semine, Head of Financial Controlling David Scherling, Sesol AB.

As electricity prices rise, more people are turning to solar panels. It’s an investment, but for those with a roof just sitting there soaking up the sun, more are seeing it as a missed opportunity. Several companies have emerged to seize this opportunity, and Swedish Sesol is one of those that has hit the mark. They trade in solar panels, charging stations, batteries, and other solar energy equipment, and have an extensive network of installers and electricians to make the solutions work.

Despite launching as recently as 2019, they have already surpassed 1,000 employees. Former CFO and now Head of Financial Controlling, David Scherling, shares that Sesol increased its revenue from SEK 320 million in 2021 to over SEK 1.4 billion in 2022, with growth continuing this year

Automation is Key

We’ve grown quite significantly, and for us, it’s been very important to minimize everything related to the manual handling of incoming invoices. We’d rather spend our time on exception handling and creating more automation, he smiles.

Scherling explains that the finance department—including accounting, payroll, controlling, and the like—consists of about 20 people, but only one of them handles incoming invoices.

As electricity prices rise, solar panels become increasingly popular, and companies like Sesol benefit from this trend. Sesol deals in solar panels, charging stations, and batteries and has a vast network of installers and electricians ensuring successful implementation.

AP automation is the key to Sesol’s success in handling large volumes of incoming invoices efficiently. Automated accounting has enabled Sesol to grow rapidly without increasing the number of employees in the finance department. SEMINE’s invoice processing solution makes it easy to automate processes related to incoming invoices. ERP integration with Visma.net has simplified the implementation of SEMINE’s system at Sesol. SEMINE’s data capture at the invoice line level provides Sesol with valuable insights and improves budgeting processes.

- Our accounting manager now handles around 100 invoices a day, while also performing other tasks.

With the processes we’re building now, we’ll definitely surpass 25,000 this year. As we see it, this means saving at least one position, even in the longer term, he says.

READ MORE: How efficient is actually your invoice processing?

A significant part of the explanation is that Sesol has implemented SEMINE. Although it’s only been a few months, Scherling notes that the system quickly delivered positive results.

- We got up and running very quickly, and it didn’t take long before invoices from established suppliers were processed 100% automatically.

However, because we’re growing so fast, we’re constantly getting new suppliers, and there’s always a short onboarding period before they include the information we want on the invoices for them to be processed automatically. The goal is for all coding to happen nearly fully automatically, he says.

Automating Even More

Sesol is also well underway in leveraging SEMINE’s functionality, which helps them extract a lot of data from each line item on the invoices the solution processes.

- SEMINE makes it very easy to perform account coding at the invoice line level. Previously, we manually split this to allocate everything to the correct cost account, but we don’t need to do that anymore.

- Today, 80% of our AP process is automated.

We also use the same data to, for instance, look at the costs for panels, batteries, and other things we buy, and then conduct analyses to see how our forecasts align with the budget, he says.

READ MORE: This is how easily the focus can be shifted from punching to analysis

They will soon implement SEMINE’s functionality for PO matching, and Scherling says this will provide even greater efficiency gains on top of what they have already achieved.

- We’re quite data-driven and have already gained access to SEMINE’s data lake. We pull figures from the system into tools like PowerBI and Qlik and work with them there. We see that focused work on this will give us much better visibility into the efficiency of our processes and good ideas on how we can improve them, he says.

- With PO matching, we’ll also be able to go much further in automating the invoice approval process. With this in place, both coding, approval, and posting of invoices will happen automatically, says Scherling.

 

Driving Success: SEMINE's Partnership with Sesol in Sweden

Sesol is a great example of SEMINE’s successful entry into the Swedish market, says Daniel Karlsen, Chief Commercial Officer at SEMINE. In the first half of 2023, SEMINE established an office in Stockholm, where the first employees in a commercial team are now in place. They already have several Swedish customers fully operational and have established multiple partnerships with Swedish ERP partners and solution providers.

Sesol is an ambitious company with rapid growth, so it’s been a pleasure to help them through SEMINE by ensuring that the focus can be set on the right things.

- Companies like Sesol, where growth, automation, and insights are on the agenda, are a perfect fit for us to work with. Sesol has been a very forward-thinking player, and we really look forward to the continuation, says Karlsen.

Scherling shares that Sesol has been very satisfied with the implementation from their side.

- We had two people dedicated to us from the start, Andreas and Kristoffer, and have had a very close dialogue with them. Since there’s a pre-built integration with Visma.net, which is our accounting system, it was almost a matter of just connecting and getting started immediately.

Implementation went quickly, he says—and has a plan ready for how to expand the use of SEMINE:

- The time ahead is about raising the automation level even further and making even better use of the data from SEMINE. We’ll work more with our profit centers and get suppliers to send correctly formatted e-invoices so that we can automate even more, says Scherling.

Tips for starting with SEMINE

Finally, Scherling offers two tips for companies starting with SEMINE:

1. Identify and start with the low-hanging fruit to show positive ROI. This creates a willingness to invest in new projects within a specific area.
   
2. Find solutions that best fit the challenge you have. Think about an ecosystem and solutions that work together—everything doesn’t have to be solved in one system.