Pioneer Property Group

Kristoffer Gradz, Chief Accounting Officer at Pioneer Property Group, outlined the challenges, solutions, and outcomes of adopting a modern cloud-based finance system. 

The challenge: Accessing timely financial insights

When Gradz joined Pioneer Property Group as Chief Accounting Officer, the organisation was in the process of moving its accounting function from agency to in-house. “Our old finance system was not suitable for our organisation. I spent half a day retrieving open accounts receivable and collecting them in Excel,” Gradz said, highlighting how finance struggled to reconcile and consolidate financial information. 

The group’s previous finance system was, like Xledger, a cloud-based system, and one of the leading financial management platforms in Norway at the time. However, being in the cloud wasn’t enough to support an ambitious real estate company like Pioneer Property Group. 

Gradz and his team demanded more from their finance system. Although their previous system made it possible to work across multiple legal entities, Gradz wanted more than just to access data. The new finance platform needed to provide timely insight, simplify reporting, and give the team a clearer financial view across the business. 

For Pioneer Property Group, the ideal finance platform needed to support the requirements of a growing real estate business, including: 

• Industry-specific setup directly in the system that simplifies administration for the real estate sector. 
• Automatic handling of proportional VAT and joint registration to reduce manual effort. 
• Consolidation of VAT statements across all entities within just a few clicks. 

With these factors in mind, Pioneer Property Group chose Xledger NO as its new financial management platform. 

“Xledger makes it easy for a CFO to be happy. Now we have up-to-date figures, and I can run reports with a few keystrokes. All this means that we get a much better and more efficient flow in payment, voucher flow, invoicing and follow-up, and distribution of common costs to tenants.” 

Gradz also highlighted the system’s user interface and reporting power: 

“Xledger is very user-friendly and makes it easy to dive into the numbers. I can pivot and filter through data in a much better way than in the other systems we looked at. And best of all, everything goes so fast that it gives a nice flow to the work.” 

An easy implementation project

For Gradz, the transition to Xledger has progressed smoothly. The group’s first entities were up and running with Xledger within a few months, and the entire company portfolio was in place in Xledger during the autumn. “The implementation went like a dream,” said Gradz. “I have worked with Xledger a lot in the past and was able to do practically all the work myself.” 

Xledger Customer Success Manager, Peter Balkevärn, noted that Pioneer Property Group’s implementation stood out because Gradz was able to lead much of the project internally: 

“[Pioneer Property Group] shows that it’s easy to implement Xledger. We recommend all our customers learn about the system during implementation. But it is rare that customers are so self-sufficient that they, like Kristoffer, can run the entire process themselves.” 

He emphasises that Xledger’s Support team helped sustain project momentum and is working with Pioneer Property Group to help the company realise the full benefits of its new system. 

“Our job is to get customers to extract the benefits from Xledger,” says Balkevärn. “Our goal here is to help customers become almost entirely self-sufficient so that they can confidently make changes themselves and, consequently, get the most out of the system.” 

Reflecting on the successful project, Gradz summarised: “Xledger is the best system for corporations and for real estate companies. We are both at Pioneer Property Group, and that made our choice easy.” 

As Pioneer Property Group scales its real estate operations, it can use Xledger to create timely reports and strengthen visibility across the group, with financial information that is always up-to-date and reliable. 

If you are a real estate finance leader looking to streamline group financial management, book your free demo with our expert housing and property consultants.