Family First Nurseries Replaces Manual Jedox Uploads With Live SharePoint Data Through Files.com

Family First Nurseries operates 100 childcare nurseries across southern and midland England. Nursery managers run their settings, while the group provides finance and business support centrally.

Financial planning and reporting for the whole estate runs in Jedox. The files the finance team actually works in, the Excel data sources and manual-journals files, live in Microsoft 365. The estate's numbers sit in two systems, and everything depends on data crossing between them.

Every Changed File Was an Upload Someone Had to Remember

Jedox could not read those files where they lived. Every time a data source or the manual-journals file changed, someone in finance took a copy and uploaded it into Jedox by hand. That was every file, every time it changed.

The cost was not the uploading. It was what happened when the upload didn't. A forgotten file produced no error: Jedox simply ran against the previous version, and the reports came out stale with nothing to flag it. The finance team would sit with figures that refused to move, work through why, and eventually discover that nothing was wrong except a missed upload. Against a finance folder whose figures were updated continuously through the working day, the group's reporting was only ever as current as the last upload someone remembered to make.

The Direct Route to Microsoft 365 Had Already Failed

This was not a problem anyone had left unexamined. FFN had tried connecting Jedox to OneDrive directly, and it failed. Jedox's supported ingestion paths do not reach into SharePoint or OneDrive, and neither side of the gap was FFN's to change: the connectors belong to Jedox, Microsoft 365 belongs to Microsoft, and the finance team was not going to abandon the files it works in all day to suit an integration.

So the fix had to sit between the two systems. It had to present the live Microsoft 365 content rather than a periodic copy of it, because the figures change all day. It had to speak a protocol Jedox already supports. And it had to leave finance saving files exactly where it always had.

FFN already held the far end of that bridge. Jedox was pulling the estate's nightly operational extracts from Files.com over FTP: an external operating-platform provider drops CSVs from all 100 nurseries into Files.com each night, and Jedox collects them on schedule. The finance files were the one feed still moving by hand, and the one carrying the figures that changed most often. In July 2024, FFN chose to close the gap the same way: put the finance folders on Files.com too, and let Jedox read them over the connection it already had.

Files.com Between Microsoft 365 and Jedox

Working with the Files.com customer success team, FFN mounted its SharePoint finance folders into Files.com using a Remote Server Mount. A mount is not a copy: SharePoint stays the system of record, and Files.com presents its folders live, so the file Jedox sees is the file finance saved, the moment it was saved.

The connection did not start that way. The first build ran as a scheduled sync on a four-hour interval, which automated the uploads but still left Jedox hours behind a folder whose figures change through the day. Rebuilding it as a real-time mount removed the lag and the second copy at once. The mounted directory kept the path the sync had used, so FFN gained real-time data without rebuilding any existing Jedox workflows.

Nothing about Jedox's setup moved either. It reads the mounted SharePoint folders through the same Files.com FTP connection that already carries the estate's nightly CSVs. To Jedox, the finance team's live working files are simply more folders on a server it already knows.

Saved Once, Current in Jedox

With the mount in production, FFN retired the hand-upload step and the failure mode that came with it.

• Manual uploads into Jedox are gone for the finance folder. When a finance user saves a file, the next Jedox run pulls the current version, with nobody in between. That closes the failure mode in which a missed upload silently left reports stale.
• Finance changed nothing about how it works. The team saves where it always saved; the integration meets the files there.

There is a broader result underneath those. Every feed Jedox consumes now reaches it the same way: as a folder on Files.com, over one FTP connection. The nightly reporting CSVs from 100 nurseries and the finance team's live Excel files arrive by different routes, a scheduled vendor drop on one side and a real-time SharePoint mount on the other, and Jedox never sees the difference. A future data source that cannot connect to Jedox directly has a pattern waiting: land it on Files.com, and it is already connected.

One Connection Carrying the Estate's Numbers

Today, the finance team of a 100-nursery group plans against the current versions of its files on every Jedox run. The quiet obligation the old process placed on people, to remember the upload for every file and every change or let the reports lie, no longer exists. When a number moves in Jedox now, it is because the business moved.

FFN never got the direct Jedox-to-Microsoft 365 connection it originally went looking for. It turned out not to need one. Files.com speaks SharePoint on one side and FTP on the other, and both systems stayed exactly what they were: Microsoft 365 remains where finance works, Jedox remains where the group plans, and Files.com carries the estate's numbers between them, live.