Leroy Merlin is a major retail chain specializing in the sale of DIY, gardening, construction, furniture, and home decor products. Founded by the Leroy Merlin family in 1925 and acquired by the Mulliez family (Auchan Group) in 1981, it is now the leading company in the Adeo Group and the top player in the French home improvement market.
With a century-long history, Leroy Merlin has continuously evolved and innovated to stay closely aligned with the needs and desires of its customers. Leroy Merlin in numbers:
As with many companies, optimizing financial management is a critical concern for Leroy Merlin. Payment reconciliation, in particular, is one of the financial operations most impacted by business volume, changes in payment habits, the number of stores, and sales channels.
Reconciling all transactions across all Leroy Merlin stores throughout different regions of France is no walk in the park! The challenge is to have a reconciliation system that minimizes human error, is robust enough to handle high transaction volumes, and provides an overview of store activity to the headquarters.
With a turnover of €9.8 billion in 2022 and €9.93 billion in 2023, the number of daily transactions to reconcile is significant. French stores alone accounted for 90 million transactions to reconcile in 2023.
To achieve perfect payment reconciliation, each cash register payment must match a transaction recorded in the store’s accounting, as well as in the group’s accounting.
At the end of the day, when the stores close, cash balances must be verified and balanced before being transmitted to the headquarters. This is when cash register errors (payments, returns, refunds, human errors, etc.) can surface, and these accumulated errors can be costly!
A second challenge arises: in addition to detecting cash register errors, they must be identified and corrected. Tracing the source of the error within the store or from the headquarters becomes crucial. Visibility and accessibility are therefore key. It’s important to have a global overview of all stores, as well as a detailed view by store and by transaction, enabling easy navigation from an overall view to a detailed one
In addition to the large number of transactions and stores, Leroy Merlin faces another challenge when it comes to reconciliation. Like many other major retailers, the company must manage different sales channels and payment methods.
Between drive-through, click & collect, online sales, and in-store purchases, attributing each sale to a store and reconciling transactions that occur across various channels also represents a challenge. For the finance department to ensure data traceability and consistency across all channels, an accessible solution is needed, offering transaction storage and history with visibility and accuracy for the relevant stakeholders.
The same applies to payment methods. Card payments, contactless payments, smartphone payments, cash, or gift cards. Additionally, installment payments (or Buy Now Pay Later), discounts and promotional codes, loyalty points… Recording payments is complex and diverse, sometimes requiring standardized entries to facilitate reconciliation.
Finally, the rise of self-checkout systems, which allow customers to handle their own checkouts and item scanning, improve the consumer experience but can also lead to cash register errors.
Automation emerges as the primary choice when it comes to enhancing efficiency, particularly in addressing the challenges of large-scale retail reconciliation.
Indeed, the large volume of transactions can be reconciled in seconds with a robust solution. Multi-currency and multi-channel transactions are also more easily managed, as is the diversity of payment methods thanks to standardized recorded entries.
Finally, the challenge of having a consolidated view at the group and financial management level is also made easier because automation tools also come with analysis tools and customizable dashboard creation features.
Leroy Merlin’s primary need is to adopt an automated reconciliation system that allows them to quickly process their large volume of transactions, improving efficiency and reliability in cash register payment reconciliation.
They seek to implement a solution that addresses these new challenges while being durable, scalable, and user-friendly.
Their ultimate goal: to achieve a higher matching rate and a lower discrepancy rate.
Before implementing Calixys’ XREC solution, they were losing 3.6% of their revenue due to payment matching errors.
XREC allows merchants to automatically and quickly reconcile their payments, whether made in-store or online, by credit card or other payment methods, while ensuring data reliability.
Leroy Merlin relied on Calixys to establish effective reconciliation processes tailored to their business and new challenges. To fully harness the potential of the XREC solution, Leroy Merlin’s teams decided to completely rethink their reconciliation processes. The goal was to maximize the advantages of the solution and develop a process adapted to it.
Throughout the project, Leroy Merlin’s teams had a dedicated person to oversee implementation. They were also supported in setting up new processes and trained in using the tool.
Regarding the tangible results of the solution’s implementation within the company, Leroy Merlin’s teams provided Calixys feedback on their experience.
What was your initial issue or the challenges to overcome ?
“Our business teams have several million transactions to reconcile each month. We needed to highlight our discrepancies and therefore were looking for a tool that could quickly absorb our millions of transactions, be scalable to integrate our future payment methods, and help streamline our accounting.”
What were you expecting from reconciliation software, and what were your requirements ?
“We needed a powerful tool that our teams could use in autonomy. Additionally, we needed to be able to custom the matching rules.”
What goals did you set at the start of the project, and were they achieved ?
“Our goal was to launch a pilot, to then extend it within our company and/or the group. After six months of preparation, development, and support, we have been using the XREC solution since November 2023.
The XREC tool met our expectations in terms of capacity, timing, and organization. The results became apparent very quickly:
To summarize, what has XREC contributed to your processes, and what do you expect in the future ?
“The implementation of the XREC tool highlighted dysfunctions in our end-to-end processes, which were quickly corrected.
We are already looking into expanding the solution. We are open to any tool improvements that could further optimize our matching rules and/or discrepancy identification (e.g., through AI).”
The Calixys team thanks the business, finance, and communication teams at Leroy Merlin for their trust and collaboration.
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