INEOS – A Bespoke Integration for a Global Chemical Leader.

The INEOS logo with black text on a white background.

INEOS Group Limited is a global petrochemicals and specialty chemicals company headquartered in London, UK. Founded in 1998, it has grown rapidly through acquisitions into one of the world’s largest privately owned industrial groups, operating across chemicals, oil and gas, and advanced materials. 

INEOS produces a wide range of essential materials used in everyday life, including plastics, polymers, and chemicals that feed into industries such as healthcare, packaging, construction, automotive, electronics, and energy. Beyond its core industrial operations, the company has diversified into automotive (notably the INEOS Grenadier vehicle) and elite sports investments, including football, cycling, and Formula 1. The group comprises of over 36 independent business units and operates over 150 sites in more than 30 countries. It employs over 23,000 people and generates annual revenues of approximately $50 billion. 

Business Challenges.

INEOS required a robust, scalable financial system to manage its complex accounting and financial operations, alongside the manufacturing operations systems running at its sites. Although INEOS implemented the Sage 200 Professional ERP System at its head office for accounting and finance operations, its data management processes remained manual and didn’t align with compliance requirements. Other challenges included handling non-GBP functional (base) currencies for the UK-registered companies when preparing and submitting VAT returns to the UK tax authority. 

Key challenges included: 

  • Manual data entry of other systems data into the ERP system instead of automated imports 

  • Creating vendor payments and remittances manually and submitting payments to the bank manually one by one.

  • Converting non-GBP functional currency VAT return transactions to GBP-converted values and preparing VAT returns manually to submit to the UK Tax authority.

  • Prone to Human Error: Manual entry or currency conversion increased the risk of errors, leading to potential delays and reconciliation issues. 

  • Lacking Scalability: The manual process became a bottleneck that threatened to impede efficiency as the company continued its rapid global expansion, with the head office taking on more companies for bookkeeping, consolidations, and reporting.

INEOS recognised the need for a comprehensive solution that would bridge the gap between their Sage 200 ERP and data management, including bank integration, to automate vendor payment processing. In addition, automating workflows for data import and reporting was critical to improve efficiency and reduce costs. 

ACS-APT Solutions:

ACS-APT partnered with INEOS to develop tailored data management and reporting systems.  As a result, ACS-APT developed a generic data import model that can be used across companies to import different types of accounting transactions using a single data file. To comply with the vendor payments process, ACS-APT developed a vendor payment file integration for Citi Bank so that users can generate a vendor payment file from the ERP system and submit it to the bank. We also developed non-GBP functional (base) currency transaction value conversion to GBP for VAT reporting to ensure the converted GBP values are correct per the currency rates set up in the system for each period. Generating a currency-converted VAT report was just a mouse click away.  

By automating the process, it removed manual data management, leaving users more time to focus on reconciliations, analysing reports and data, and higher-value tasks. This helped significantly improve financial control and operational efficiency. 

  • Seamless Transaction Import: A customized template allowed INEOS to import transactions from various data sources directly into Sage, ensuring consistency and accuracy. 

  • Compliant and secure automated vendor payment process 

  • Auto generated within-system reporting of non-GBP functional currency transaction conversion for VAT return submission with full auditability  

  • Reduced User Errors: By automating the data management processes it reduced the potential for human error, ensuring the integrity of financial data. 

  • Improved operational efficiency and significant time savings  

  • Scalability & Future-Proofing to use the solution across the business and sites 

Conclusion.

The successful implementation of this solution has laid a strong foundation for the continued partnership between ACS-APT and INEOS. With a scalable and reliable data management and vendor payment system in place, INEOS is now equipped to set up more companies within their Sage 200 Professional ERP system, further leveraging their current infrastructure to support their future expansion plans.