Flanders Investment Company

How FICO Saves Hours per Week on Real Estate Due Diligence with Crunched

Core metrics

• 3-4h/week saved on ad-hoc Excel work, including formatting and back-of-envelope calculations
• 5x faster to identify errors in received materials

About the client

• Client: Flanders Investment Company (FICO)
• Industry: Real Estate Investment (Family Office)
• Primary Use Case: Excel error checking, Investment Memorandum extraction, and feasibility model automation
• Product: Crunched - AI Excel Analyst for finance professionals

"I've intensively tested other tools such as Claude for Excel and Shortcut, and I can say – hands down – that Crunched is better."
PR: Pieter Raes, Development Director at Flanders Investment Company

Executive Summary

Flanders Investment Company (FICO), a Belgian real estate investor (family office), uses Crunched to streamline its most repetitive and error-prone Excel workflows. As Development Director, Pieter Raes manages a high volume of internal spreadsheets alongside models received from selling parties during transactions. All of these need to be checked, formatted, and analyzed under tight timelines.

By deploying Crunched directly inside Excel, FICO saves 3-4 hours per week on ad-hoc Excel tasks and has significantly increased confidence in the accuracy of their deliverables. What started with error checking has expanded into automated extraction from Investment Memorandums and feasibility template population, with room to grow.

Pieter now showcases Crunched in a Real Estate Private Equity modeling course at KU Leuven. This is a testament to how deeply the tool has been integrated into his professional workflow.

The Challenge

Volume meets complexity

Real estate investment and development runs on Excel. At FICO, the team juggles a constant flow of internal models and external spreadsheets from counterparties. Each comes with its own formatting conventions, assumptions, and potential errors.

• Seller-provided spreadsheets arrive in inconsistent formats and frequently contain mistakes, from broken formulas to subtle formatting issues.
• Investment Memorandums contain dense assumption data that needs to be manually transferred into feasibility templates.
• Ad-hoc Excel work such as formatting, quick calculations, and back-of-envelope analysis adds up to hours of low-value time every week.

These tasks are unavoidable. Every deal requires them. But they consume hours of skilled analyst time on work that is fundamentally mechanical. This includes cross-checking numbers, reformatting data, and copying assumptions between documents.

The Solution

Crunched as the first line of defense

FICO uses Crunched across three core workflows:

1. Excel Error Checking
   Crunched scans both internal models and spreadsheets received from selling parties, flagging errors that range from broken formulas to formatting inconsistencies. For a firm processing a high volume of spreadsheets, this alone has improved their confidence in deliverable accuracy, catching issues that manual review would miss.

"We deal with a large volume of internal spreadsheets and receive models from selling parties on every deal. Crunched catches errors every single time. It has become our first line of quality control."
– Pieter Raes, Development Director

2. Investment Memorandum Extraction
   Pieter feeds Investment Memorandums into Crunched to auto-fill assumptions in FICO's feasibility template. This eliminates the manual process of reading a document, identifying the relevant data points, and keying them into the model. This workflow is both tedious and error-prone.

3. PDF Data Extraction
   Beyond IMs, Crunched's data extraction from PDFs has proven more capable than alternatives, pulling structured data into Excel-ready formats with less manual cleanup.

The Decision

Purpose-built for real estate, built for Europe

Pieter evaluated several AI tools before choosing Crunched, including general-purpose AI assistants and competing platforms. His conclusion was straightforward:

"Crunched isn't a generic AI tool. It's purpose-built for real estate modeling, and you can feel that in the output. The models are structured the way a real REPE model should be."
– Pieter Raes, Development Director

Geographic and regulatory fit also played a role. As a European firm, Pieter had concerns about data residency and the practical friction of using US-first platforms:

"With US-based tools, there are data residency considerations and small friction points that add up. Crunched is European-based but also active in the US, and that gives me more confidence."
– Pieter Raes, Development Director

Key differentiators that made FICO choose Crunched:

• Real estate native. Models are structured like actual REPE models, not generic financial templates.
• European-based. This ensures data residency and regulatory alignment for EU firms.
• Excel-native. It works directly in existing models and templates.
• Superior PDF extraction. It offers better data extraction from documents than competing tools.

The Results

Hours back, every week

Quantifiable outcomes

• 3-4 hours saved per week on ad-hoc Excel work, including formatting, back-of-envelope calculations, and quick analysis.
• Faster turnaround on feasibility models through automated IM extraction.

Qualitative impact

• Crunched catches errors that manual review would miss, from subtle formatting issues to material formula mistakes.
• The team spends less time on mechanical work and more time on deal judgment and analysis.
• There is confidence that spreadsheets from counterparties have been systematically checked before any decisions are made.

Broader Impact

Teaching the next generation

Pieter's confidence in Crunched extends beyond FICO. He now features the tool in the Real Estate Investment modeling course at KU Leuven, one of Belgium's top universities. In the course, he demonstrates building a REPE model from scratch, then shows how Crunched can replicate that same model structure using a tailored prompt. This is followed by a live demonstration of error checking on a spreadsheet with intentional mistakes built in.

It's a powerful endorsement: a practitioner using an AI tool not just in production workflows, but as a teaching instrument for the next generation of real estate professionals.

About Crunched

Crunched is an AI Excel analyst built by and for Excel power users in investment banking, private equity, and management consulting. Backed by First Round Capital, Y Combinator, 20VC and others, Crunched integrates advanced AI models directly into Excel to automate modeling, error-checking, research, and templated outputs - without breaking existing workflows.

The goal: automate Excel grunt work, one high-impact pain point at a time.