Do you want More Confidence in your Numbers?

This is how a fast-growing online payroll company that provides a unified platform for global employee pay processes at over 1,500 multinational companies got confidence in their numbers.

The pay processes include payroll, payments, and on-demand pay, and the platform is available in over 130 countries with headquarters in England.

They used AI-driven FP&A tools to consolidate different types of data and reduce time spent on budgeting and reporting. The improved accuracy and visibility have increased confidence in the numbers and the willingness to invest in growth.

Problem: Reporting and budgeting took too long and was very manual.

Before using AI-driven FP&A tools, reporting and budgeting processes were time-consuming and the management and board lacked visibility and confidence in the financials.

When a new head of FP&A was hired, his top priority was to upgrade the finance team’s technology as soon as possible.?

The structure of the company was changing rapidly, and offline financial reporting methods just couldn’t keep up. There was no easy way to keep track of financial data and no time to compare budgets to actuals or create forecasts.

Consolidating data inputs from department heads spanning different time zones and foreign currencies was a painfully long process that preceded each financial reporting and budgeting period.?

Solution: Bring together different types of data fast, for ‘ROI from Day 1’

A solution that could bring together different types of data to streamline each financial process—and do it fast.

It came down to time and how quickly they could get users on board and signed in. They had about six weeks to make a decision, start implementing the solution, and then start to carry out the budget as well.

AI-driven FP&A met those needs and had the added benefit of enabling the finance team to continue using Excel.

They compared other solutions too, but didn’t want to look at them because most of them were all about replacing Excel instead of enhancing Excel.

At this stage, they felt it was impossible to replace Excel. The beauty of AI-driven FP&A solutions is that when they were training budget holders on the system, everything looked familiar to them because they’re used to using Excel.

Automated data consolidation makes it easy to present the financials for each department in a single, simple view—without the manual effort that such consolidation would normally require.?

In terms of consolidation, they were able to pull in various data feeds from different systems and present them in one view within Excel.

The ease of use also made it easy for the company to adopt and provided ROI from Day 1.

“The functionality within the solution is exactly what any FP&A professional should be looking for in a solution." Craig Morrow head of FP&A at #CloudPay

“The implementation was extremely efficient as you start to build out real-life business processes from the outset, which means you get a return on investment from Day 1.”

Having all the financial and operational information in one place also reduces the risk of inaccurate reporting, both by exposing discrepancies in data and by providing the information necessary to account for them.

Before using the finance team had to attempt to sort out such discrepancies by asking the department heads, and they did not necessarily have the data needed to close the gaps. Now, with a click of a button, the finance or operations team can easily drill down into the consolidated data to get the information needed.

Reducing time spent on budgeting and reporting by 40%

Before struggling to stay in control over the distribution of budget files. There were many different versions and different formats, often riddled with errors. Any changes such as resolving an error or updating a number, needed to be done manually on over a dozen spreadsheets, which were then to be manually shared with each department head.

The shareability of the data was very, very manual. That’s one of the biggest pain points I recall.

The previous years’ budget seasons are something not to be remembered. Similar horror stories as every other business based on Excel. It was really difficult to find any sort of information quickly.”

Fp&A has put an end to this problem.. Now CloudPay’s budget is managed on one Excel spreadsheet which is connected online to the budget files used by each department head – so the finance team can make a change once, and it will automatically update all related files. And vice versa: Morrow will see any updated financial numbers from the department heads as his spreadsheet updates automatically.?

Datarails tracks every change and makes previous versions easily accessible, without the need to manually make changes to file names and keep previous versions saved to a local drive.?

Automating that manual work has reduced the time it takes CloudPay to complete its budgeting and month-end reporting processes by 40 percent.

“My experience with Datarails has been first-class,” said Morrow. “I have assisted with a seamless integration for budgeting purposes and have now rolled out the solution for month-end reporting. In both scenarios I have been able to reduce the time required for completion by around 40 percent.”

“When I was training our budget holders on the system, everything looked familiar to them because they’re used to using Excel.”

Using live dashboards to save time and improve stakeholder engagement in financial processes

Getting stakeholders engaged in the budget process poses a challenge for many finance teams. Morrow uses Datarails interactive dashboards as a creative solution to get the department heads and management on board.?

“Within Datarails, dashboards were just a natural extension of the solution. I found them very intuitive and very easy to build,” said Morrow.?

The dashboards he shared got good feedback from the department heads.

“When we shared those dashboards with the budget holders, they were well-received,” said Morrow. “The fact that you can essentially just automate and have a new month’s worth of data feeding into the solution, and not really worry about recreating dashboards each month made it a seamless transition.”

Using the Datarails permission settings, Morrow was able to keep financial information secure without doing the additional work of creating separate graphs for stakeholders with different permission levels.

“I only needed to build one dashboard and share that with the budget holders, and based on their permission sets they would only see their own data, for their own budget, that they were concerned with, which was really good for security and people not looking at each other’s budgets. It was good for internal politics.And at the end of the day, they look pretty cool.”?

Morrow explained how, thanks to the Datarails visualization tool, each department head is able to tell their story through the data and answer questions about how they got to their numbers.

“Each month we had a new month’s worth of data,” which is automatically fed into these personalized dashboards and PowerPoints, he said. “We actually provided each budget holder with, essentially, an executive summary of their budget output. We had a series of budget review meetings and each budget holder had to stand up and present their own budget.”?

The seamless integration among Datarails dashboards, Excel and PowerPoint saves Morrow significant time preparing the various files the organization depends on for budget season. From updating data to file collection management to delivering presentations to the board: It’s all automated.

“It was really cool to connect the budget output dashboard to a template in PowerPoint, which just pulls in the head count salary data from each department,” said Morrow. “That was presented to our leadership team and to the board. Because I can add filters and permission settings for each department, I only had to create the PowerPoint once.”

found them very intuitive and very easy to build,” said Morrow.

“Within Datarails, dashboards were just a natural extension of the solution. I found them very intuitive and very easy to build.”

The impact: More visibility leads to greater confidence in the numbers and investment in company growth

The increased accuracy, reliability and granularity of the data has given the CloudPay board far greater confidence in the numbers than it had before the company started using Datarails. And that made it possible to invest in the company’s growth through board approval of $2 million to develop a better payroll engine. Beyond board confidence, increased visibility also means stakeholders within the company can now instantly access visualizations of the entire company’s data at a glance. Being able to apply different filters and views to dashboards means there is always one source of truth.

“Because there was visibility, everyone understood what was happening a lot more,” said Morrow. “There was a lot of clarity on exactly what the numbers were telling us. The board said, ‘We don’t mind investing more this year.’” Datarails’ data consolidation and real-time drill-down capabilities helped the board see that CloudPay had a much firmer grasp on the financials than before.

“Templates which compared actuals to budget to previous years at the click of a button enabled me to very quickly answer any questions or even provide the analysis, data, explanation and story behind the numbers,” said Morrow. “Because there was such visibility into the overall P&L and a lot more granularity than we ever had, there were new projects and investments that were then able to be included in the overall budget.”?

Datarails is a financial planning and analysis platform for Excel users. Its FP&A software solution automates data consolidation, reporting, and planning while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.