Independent Africa focused telecom tower firm Eaton Towers has implemented software from cloud corporate performance management software company Adaptive Insights. Doing so has consolidated financials across seven countries, transformed the company's financial reporting and added key support to its expansion strategy.

According to a statement issued by Adaptive Insights, Eaton Towers has accelerated its monthly reporting by 100% and facilitated its raise of $350 million in equity funding last year – "which was critical to the company's expansion from three to six markets in less than a year," says Adaptive Insights.

"Eaton Towers has set out on a bold mission to help bring affordable mobile communications to Africa. With 5,000 towers in seven African countries, it has the most diversified geographical tower portfolio on the continent. The company deployed Adaptive Consolidation, part of the Adaptive Suite, to give it visibility into the performance of each region, and Adaptive OfficeConnect, to allow easy, professional reporting of that performance to both current and potential investors," reads the statement.

"The delivery of affordable mobile communications requires that we carefully manage our own financial performance and our expenses," said Peter Cannan, group financial controller. "At the same time, we are on a fast growth trajectory and needed software that I could set up myself and would be easily understood by our users with very little training. Adaptive Insights software fit the bill, and today we are rolling up and reporting on substantial amounts of data—sometimes with the simple click of a button."

According to the Adaptive Insights CFO Indicator Q3 2015 report, one-third of CFOs predict the amount of data they manage will increase over 50% within the next five years.

Additionally, 41% of finance teams manage data from three to five source systems, and 22% pull from as many as five to 10 systems.

The increase in both data and data sources has a significant impact on finance teams of all sizes and across all industries looking to consolidate and report performance.

"For fast-growing businesses, there are great benefits to be had from the agility and flexibility of cloud technology–as it effectively scales as the business does," said Ian Preston, vice president of United Kingdom & Ireland, Adaptive Insights. "This agility is even more important for Eaton Towers, which has the added challenge of working across a vast geographical distance. Using our software, the finance team has been able to transform its processes across a continent, making its financial viability clear to investors, and putting the infrastructure in place for further growth."