Rituals Transforms Cash Flow Forecasting with Real-Time Financial Data
By automating two critical financial processes, Rituals eliminated manual payment uploads and improved cash flow forecasting, significantly boosting efficiency and reducing errors across 27 legal entities.
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The Challenge
Rituals financial department faced a complex, manual workflow. Cash flow forecasting was done manually in Excel, which made it hard to get a clear and current picture of the company’s cash position.
Each week, payment files had to be uploaded by hand to multiple bank platforms for 27 different legal entities, which took time and introduced risk. There was no automated way to collect and process daily bank statements, which meant key financial information arrived late or not at all.
As the business grew, this setup made it difficult to plan ahead, slowed down decision-making, and increased the chance of delays or errors.
The Goal
The goal was simple: make cash flow forecasting faster, more accurate, and easier to manage. To get there, Rituals wanted to automate repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and ensure financial data was always up to date.
They also needed a solution that integrated with their existing systems, gave them better control over financial processes, and provided the insights needed to make confident, real-time decisions.
About our customer
Founded in 2000 by Dutch CEO Raymond Cloosterman, cosmetic brand Rituals has grown excessively; from one store in the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam to more than 800 stores, 1500 shop-in-shops, and four urban wellness centers in 27 countries all over the world. Rituals has expanded into the U.S., Asia, and other territories and continues to compete with more well-established brands, so delivering a superior shopping experience is vital. The company has evolved into an omnichannel retailer with significant online sales, and its results speak for themselves.
The retail company offers a combination of home and body cosmetics in their stores and on their website rituals.com. Rituals unite advanced technology with ancient far Eastern rituals to present a range of affordably priced products that turn everyday routines like bathing and shaving into meaningful rituals
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The Solution
Crystalloids helped Rituals build The Payment Hub, a fully automated, cloud-native platform that connects financial systems, streamlines payment processing, and enables real-time data flows critical for forecasting.
The solution processes vendor payments end-to-end, securely handling files across the legal entities without human intervention. Daily bank statements are automatically retrieved, processed, and fed into the platform. Data is handled using an event-driven architecture on Google Cloud, which ensures every transaction is processed the moment it’s available, with no waiting for scheduled batches.
To give the finance team complete control, the platform includes detailed monitoring and alerting via Splunk and Cloud Logging. This means any anomalies, like missing files or failed transfers, are immediately flagged, ensuring continuous reliability.
We used BigQuery to keep track of processed financial files, storing metadata that helps maintain oversight without reading or analysing the file contents themselves. This allows the team to trace what’s been handled and when, improving transparency and operational control without compromising data security.
With data centralised and accessible, the forecasting process was reimagined. Rather than relying on static Excel sheets, Rituals works with live data streams, turning forecasting into a dynamic, responsive process.
The Result
With real-time financial data available flowing through the Payment Hub, Rituals’ finance team can forecast cash flow faster and more precisely. What was once a slow, manual process built around Excel spreadsheets and fragmented data has become a streamlined, automated workflow that enables proactive financial planning.
Manual uploads and delays are gone. Vendor payments move efficiently across all legal entities, with approvals and banking connections managed directly within the Payment Hub. The finance team can see what’s happening, understand what’s coming, and respond quickly when needed.
An additional forecasting module built into the Payment Hub has replaced the spreadsheet-based approach once maintained by the finance team. Instead of working with outdated files, the team now has accurate, up-to-date insights they can act on.
Cash flow forecasting is now a reliable, strategic function that helps keep the business on track.
