Lunettes Pour Tous uses virtual IBANs to accelerate the reconciliation of its stores' transactions.

The majority of Lunettes Pour Tous’ store revenues do not come directly from in-store customer purchases. The revenues of Lunettes Pour Tous primarily come from reimbursements made by the social security system, specifically the Primary Health Insurance Funds (CPAM), and by mutual insurance companies, following customer purchases in-store. Regardless of the store where a purchase is made, the reimbursement is deposited directly into the corporate bank account of Lunettes Pour Tous — all 28 stores are company-owned, with no franchises among them. A challenge for the directors and financial teams at Lunettes Pour Tous arises because the transfers from the social security and mutual insurance companies do not contain explicit references that would link them to a specific store or customer, complicating the tracking of revenue for each store. Yet, the teams at Lunettes Pour Tous need to monitor performance and manage the accounting for each store.

With each of the 28 stores selling around 400 pairs of glasses daily and the corporate bank account receiving 1,500 transfers per day, the question arises. How can a specific sale of glasses to a specific customer be linked to a specific incoming transfer made by a specific mutual insurance company? And how can the sales of each store be tracked when all the reimbursements from Social Security and mutual insurance companies are deposited into the same place? To establish the sales and accounts of the stores, the financial teams at Lunettes Pour Tous must scrutinize the lines of the thousands of transfers received and compare them to the sales made by each store.

Faced with the difficulty of tracking the performance of its stores and the significant time spent by its financial teams in preparing the accounts for the stores, Paul Morlet, co-founder and leader of Lunettes Pour Tous, was looking for a solution that would save him a lot of time.

What is a virtual IBAN? A virtual IBAN is an alternative IBAN that masks your primary IBAN but is still linked to your bank account. Any transfer sent to one of your virtual IBANs will indeed arrive at the account associated with your virtual IBAN. The main advantage of virtual IBANs is that they allow you to easily identify the origin or destination of your transfers—provided, of course, that you supply a different virtual IBAN to all the entities that make transfers to you.

The financial teams at Lunettes Pour Tous have created several virtual IBANs for each store. Each store then provided these virtual IBANs to the third-party payer systems—the social security (CPAM) and the networks of third-party payers through which the mutual insurance reimbursements are processed. For instance, the Lunettes Pour Tous stores in Paris Châtelet and Créteil each transmitted different virtual IBANs to the social security system. However, these IBANs are both linked to the same Lunettes Pour Tous bank account.

Let’s say the CPAM of Yvelines (78) needs to reimburse the Paris Châtelet store, and the CPAM of Val-de-Marne (94) needs to reimburse the Créteil store. The CPAM of 78 sends a transfer to the virtual IBAN of the Paris Châtelet store, and the CPAM of 94 sends a transfer to the virtual IBAN of the Créteil store. These transfers both arrive at the bank account of Lunettes Pour Tous. However, thanks to the virtual IBANs, the transfers appear as being destined for two different stores. They are immediately categorized.

Using the search filters of Memo Bank, the leaders and accountants of Lunettes Pour Tous can select the virtual IBANs of interest and display all related transfers. If they want to see the transfers from third-party payers related to purchases at the Créteil store, and thus track the sales of that store, it’s possible, without any prior data processing.