10 quick wins to improve your financial data management

Video Transcription

you everyone so much for joining the webinar today. We're really excited to have you here.

Before we get started, I just have a couple of housekeeping items I want to go over with you all. So the first is our live q and a. So throughout this presentation, you're probably gonna have a lot of questions, and I don't blame you. We have our q and a section down below. Feel free to drop your questions in whenever they come up, and we have time reserved at the end where we're gonna be sure to answer all of those for you.

And next is the recording slides. So everything you see here today is being recorded. And so you are going to receive an email following this webinar that contains the recording as well as a copy of all of the slides. So don't worry about taking notes. Everything will be sent to you, and you can review it at your own convenience later.

So now for my favorite part, introducing our speakers for the day. So first, we have Jim who has over thirteen years of experience leading complex EPM and CPM implementations, and he's currently the head of solutions consulting here at Qube.

From Fortune five hundred organizations to privately held corporations generating over a hundred million dollars in revenue to public center entities. Jim has consulted and supported a wide range of clients throughout his career, and we are really lucky to have him here today. Next is Drew, who is one of the cofounders of FP and HEY, which is a community for growth minded FP and A professionals.

He has over twenty years of FP and A and accounting experience ranging from Fortune one hundred companies to hypergrowth private companies, and his main goal is to help FP and A professionals find success. So he is perfect for this webinar. We're really excited to have him here with us today. And last but not least, we have Jardi, who is another cofounder of FP and HEY.

He's a proven finance leader with over fifteen years of deep expertise in corporate finance, FP and A, and strategy. And what drives him are his passions for entrepreneurship, AI, automation, martial arts, and personal growth. That's all very impressive. I am very interested in the martial arts.

We are going to have to talk more about that later, but we have a webinar to get to. So without further ado, Drew, I'm gonna pass things off to you to kick things off for us.

Awesome. Thanks, Alyssa.

Welcome, everyone.

Today, we're gonna talk about why you should care about effective financial beta management.

And that doesn't sound like a very, exciting topic to be quite honest, but, we've all been there. You look at these two pictures where we've had nights where we've slept really well, and, our data is nice and clean, and, we don't really stress much about it. And then we've had those days where we literally whatever hair we have left, we're pulling it out because data's everywhere. It's not tying out, and there's so many things going wrong that where do you even start. So the idea of this webinar, it's not to be super fancy. It's to be super basic. What are some simple things you can do so you can sleep better at night, all surrounded with best practices and data integrity and data accessibility?

So we'll fly through that in, like, twenty, thirty minutes, and we'll leave time at the end for q and a like Alyssa said.

So without further ado, we'll jump right into it.

Alright. So first topic, why is financial data management important?

And to kick things off, let's get insanely basic. We all have experiences with a car. So a car is actually a great example of taking information and making it super relevant.

When you go into a car, you know how far you can go with the gas you have or the charge you have. You'll know if your engine's working because you have a check engine light. Right? And you'll know because of your fancy, app that you have on your phone, what paths to your destination make the most sense and how long it'll take to get there. That is information at your fingertips in a timely way that allows you to drive your car.

That is exactly what you need for your business, and it's definitely achievable. And it getting there is is is the what we're gonna go through today. So if you go to the next slide, Alyssa, we transition from the car to the business.

How much can you invest?

Are your ongoing business operations profitable? And what decisions can you make in a timely way to achieve your goals? And those goals can be based on number of customers, growing revenue, keeping cash flow positive, you name it. All those things, although businesses can be super complex in all in all different industries, bring it back to driving a car.

You can drive a car with data. The idea is you drive your business with your data. Alright. Next slide, Alyssa.

Okay. So first, call it section of the two. So data integrity and and the role that it plays. So let's, let's go to the next slide.

We've all heard the term, garbage in and garbage out, and you can click through all the bullets list. I think there's three there. So data integrity comes down to kind of three basic things, accuracy, trust, and speed. So is the data right?

Can you trust it even though you think it might be right? And can you get it in a timely way? And Jim and Yardi and myself all have experiences with garbage in, garbage out and cleaning data up and then also making it relevant and making it trustworthy and speeding up, how we get it. So what we're about to get into is all those things and specific tactical, practical things you can do literally tomorrow to help you improve your data integrity at your own companies.

I think we have a poll next. Right, Alyssa?

Cool.

So, I think you're on mute, Alyssa, but what is your biggest challenge with maintaining there you go. Perfect. Data I'm gonna read it. What is your biggest challenge with maintaining data integrity in your organization? So if you guys could do me a favor and just answer that, we'll just take a look and see, what everybody says.

And, Alyssa, let me know, once the poll closes.

Cool.

Alright. So it's kinda spread across the board.

Jim, Yadi, I don't know if you have any, like, favorites in this one.

I think I would have chosen data consistency. What would you have chosen, Jim?

Yeah. I'm not surprised nobody selected security. Usually, there's other team members outside of finance that are usually that falls into their purview. So I would I you know, consistency, I think, is a big one.

You know, I hear it all the time, just arguments over what metric we're looking at. Is that the right metric? Where'd you get that formula from, that that validation? So I kinda I guess it folds over all of them, but consistency is a big one, especially in my role relevant to trying to tie data across different systems.

Right? Well, on this system, I call it x. In this system, I call it y. So we have to go through a convoluted mapping, and we miss things all the time.

So driving consistency, I think, is a pretty consistent problem across most organizations I talk to at least, but would love to hear from you already as well.

I was gonna say the same thing as you, Jim. You know? Accuracy is incredibly important.

Validation, you gotta ensure that the data is right. And then buy in, which is where the consistency comes in because if you don't have that consistency, let's say you're going through a budget or a forecast cycle, and for the nth time, you have to explain what MRR is. You kinda start seeing that shortfall. So I agree with you. I was a little surprised at the consistency, and, I'm curious here. What which one would you lean towards?

I I was gonna choose consistently. We didn't rehearse this one either. So consistent data, like, that helps me sleep better at night when you know where it comes from, and just, the quality of it. And then, obviously, you wanna get it better. But, yeah, consistency is always, usually my winner in that, in this poll. So that's cool.

Thanks for the poll. Let's just let's perfect. So five quick wins to improve data integrity. Alright. So this is where we get into, like, the meat of it. Like, let's get some practical tips and use cases of how we've, improved data data integrity.

Cool. Alright. So first one, standardized data entry practices.

This gets into, honestly, figuring out very simple things like your accounts and your departments. And I'm always on the side of quality over quantity. I've been at places, Fortune one hundred companies where the amount of accounts grew by the day, and there were hundreds, if not thousands, of accounts and the same complexities with departments where it was just overwhelmingly, like, who's the owner of what? And it just got so spider webbed out out of control that, there was no, organization to the chaos, so to speak. And, Yardi, I know you've worked for Fortune one hundred, and you've also consulted and worked for, one to ten employee companies to help them, do all sorts of things. Do you have any tips or practical things in approaching things like accounts and departments to make them, the most useful for businesses and just understanding their information?

I always lean on the I always lean on the purview of, does the account and department drive a decision or lead to a decision that I quantity.

And one of my first drafts was at GE, and I remember one of the exercises we had to do was clean up a hundred different departments, and we tuned that down to, like, fifteen.

And the question was, does it drive a decision, and does it impact a KPI or metric? And that's what I, I always recommend to our teams as well where think about how you're driving decisions with these accounts and departments. And if they don't, consider removing that. And, it always goes back to a key skill that we always talk about, which is just challenging the data that you see in front of you as well.

Cool. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah. Let's go to number number two. Automate data validation. Okay.

So this is an interesting one too. So when you think about data validation, that's where you kind of contain the craziness that is creating more and more and more just for the sake of creating more. This is where you can get into, like, simple things like forcing drop down list in systems so that, again, very simple. Numbers of an account have the same number of digits.

It sounds super easy and super, simple, but it's actually not when you're in the weeds of just doing everyday business operations and depending on where your business is. Especially if you're in hypergrowth mode installing systems, people don't think of necessarily these things right off the bat.

And honestly identifying what the most important information is that your company has. An example like that might be or you might say, oh, financial information is always most important, and that is true. You can't run out of cash and you gotta grow revenue. But things like customer accounts, things like users, retention rates, these are all important things.

You need to figure out what the one, two, three, four most important are so you can kind of focus on those and validate those. And then that AI robot isn't the person taking our jobs quite yet. That is your AI yeah. That is your data champion.

So every company I've been at, big and small, having a data champion, throughout the month, the quarter, the year, reviewing very specific things, and having that person responsible for things like definitions and making sure data's right was super critical. It was like that one person to go to.

And, Yardi, when when you, review information, whether it's financial or nonfinancial, do do you have any, like, best practices to kinda seal the deal? Like, hey. This thing has been reviewed, and it's approved, and it's kind of banked so that people can understand. Like, what what processes do you go through? Because you have all sorts of experiences with reviewing information and ensuring it's accurate and reasonable, and people actually understand it. What do you do when you need to review information like this with key stakeholders?

That's a really good point, Drew. One thing that I like to do personally and you can have a variety of different systems, but creating an SOPs, document, if you will, a a bible source of truth. You know, I like to use things like Notion. At bigger companies, you might have Jira or Confluence pages, Trello for those who are maybe at smaller companies, and create a document that just lists out every single report and what data sources they use and what is the definition of each of those data fields.

And at times, it might seem like a lot of work, but once you put in that work upfront, you start to just have conversations with your business stakeholders, and then they'll start to buy in into those definitions so that when you, the finance person, the FP and A person, when you start to do your analysis and all sorts of deliverables, there isn't a question of how did you create that metric? Where does your data source? You can always refer to that document, and that is something that you can always refresh. One thing that I like to do is I have, like, a an appendix, so to speak, when I speak with people where it's like, oh, yeah.

Just for reference, take a look at this just as a key reminder of how we gather data and how we calculate our metrics using that data. So best practice is finding a document where you don't have to always, on an ad hoc basis, explain these definitions. You just have one document. Everyone buys into it.

Then you can have real, discussions around things like strategies and taking actions.

Yep. And just to chime in here, I think all these lessons apply if you can advocate for them in other systems like your CRM. Right?

You have finance people who are always grabbing data from a Salesforce, so on and so forth. And, you know, especially sales reps are notorious for not filling things out. So the more you can advocate with your rev ops leaders to force drop down lists, things like that, the easier you're gonna make it on yourself for those nonfinancial data systems that you guys were talking about as well.

Alright. Number three, conduct regular data audit. So, I never became a CPA in auditing. I was always like, I don't know if I can do these types of things, but audits are so super critical, to FP and a accounting.

Like, honestly, even just general business best practices and standard operating procedures. So this is where, again, data champion, and your likely accounting team, so depending on how big you are, runs point. You already mentioned it before, keeping definitions up to date. It sounds, super simple and basic, but not a lot of people do it because once you create something, you kind of forget about it.

And if you don't memorialize it and constantly remind people, like Jim said, and educate people, people forget. And you'll end up spending time in a room where it's like, hey. Where did this come from, and what does this mean again? And that becomes, like, most of your conversation versus actually making business decisions.

And that's where you get into, like, informing key stakeholders about information. And we'll get into it in a couple slides, but, like, finance for non finance, education and understanding is super key in this. And it just helps with this whole circular loop of, like, getting information, making sure it's accurate, giving it to the right key stakeholders, make decisions, and then do it all over again to measure if those decisions were successful or not.

I don't know. Yardi, do you have anything to add on the, on the definitions piece? I wanna, like, I know this is a FP and A webinar, but I think definitions are one of those things that often get left to the side. Like, any what is do you have any key tips or tricks or, ways in which to define things and and understand what's relevant to your business? What have you seen work in the past?

I think and this always goes without saying. Depends on the size of your and how mature the company is. But one thing that isn't being spoken enough that I wanna add here is that now that we have AI, you know, some companies use Slack for, Slack AI. Excuse me.

And you can start to incorporate these things. If you work, in a company where you're using things like Notion, Notion has Notion AI. You can start to have your stakeholders fetch for themselves now. You know?

And that's a key component for myself as well where questions pop up. You can always refer back to that document. You know, that's something that's really cool about AI today where I can just put into a system and say, what's MRR stand for again? What's the data sources in there again?

And that'll pop up quickly. But I always say this, though. If you do have a business partner who just genuinely wants to sit down with you and go over it again, please, please, please schedule that time and meet with them because, AI can never take away that relationship piece. So I always caveat that.

Yeah. Good point.

Alright. Number four, implement access controls. Alright. So speaking of AI, I am no artistic genius or anything like that, and I created that too many cooks in the kitchen image, I think, in under ten seconds.

Thank you, chat g p t. But that's a image of we've all I think we've all felt this in some way, shape, or form, the cooks in the kitchen, issue too many. So I remember going into a, it was like a two hundred million dollar company at the time, and I owned the profit forecasting process. And what I learned was I we had twenty five to thirty editors of the profit forecasting process in our system at any point in time, and this was a company with a size of, like, two hundred employees.

So literally ten percent of the employees at a company had access and was able to overwrite financial information at any point in time during the given month. So when presenting information, it would change constantly.

So my approach is, less is more. And it's not that you don't wanna be, sharing and caring kind of thing. It's more of a, you want one person or a small group of people to manage editing rights, and then you want another subgroup to manage reviewing.

And that distribution of information critical because as you get into that process, it just becomes that boring drumbeat thing of, like, cool. It's the workday five. Editors are going in and changing things based on information they get, and then it's the workday seven or ten. Now we're distributing information.

And like you already said, those meetings that you have, those face to faces or those Zooms, super important because it's not just about definitions. It's about the context of the business, and it's the context of the numbers. I truly, truly believe that AI will speed people in FP and N accounting up tremendously just like the computers sped people up in, you know, the eighties and nineties and the Internet sped up people in the nineties and two thousands. AI will speed us all up.

It won't replace us. It's gonna change how we work. And that meeting that person to person, discussion is is even more critical today because as things change, as competition has access to the same tools, we'll need to make decisions faster and have really clearly articulate what those financial impacts, will be. And, Yadi, what do you do when you do a review?

So, when you sit down with somebody, I remember back in the day, we used to work with people that we printed out binders for. So, like, today, we won't go back twenty years ago. But today, when you walk into the Zoom meeting, like, what are you armed with? How are you doing it and reviewing something with somebody who isn't a finance person and going through their numbers?

Yeah. So we'll we'll cover in a couple slides from now, but taking that snapshot or that archive of when you put in your numbers, let's say, in the budgeting forecast.

I'm a very big proponent of just communication in general. You know, a lot of times, we'll send an email maybe a month, two month in advance of the budget, and we kinda stop there. And so what I've done as best practice is I send weekly communication. And then throughout the week, I'll just check-in with my business partners or executives and just ask, hey.

Do you have any trouble? Do you need help with this? And what I found oftentimes, which is kinda funny, is that a lot of times people wait for the last minute. So what I did to kinda circumvent that is I would schedule a meeting, and that one hour, we'd bang out the budget.

Just one hour. Just get in there. Here's all the information because we have the snapshot.

And then depending on, you know, who is allowed access, you know, typically, in this case, if you're a budget owner of, let's say, I don't know, the legal department, you might be working with your chief legal officer. You know, sometimes they just don't have time to get into that system. So, you know, what I like to do is I'll just sit down with them, go in there, we'll do it together, even though they have the access right. And once we finish it, we'll turn off their access right.

It's snapshot right there now. Nothing else gets adjusted, and they have to come to you directly now. For everyone else, we'll do the same thing. Hey.

We send it out business day zero. By business day ten, you can make your adjustments. And on the tenth, we're gonna shut. And anything after that, just reach out to me.

We'll make those adjustments. And I found that that oftentimes I mean, the reality is we can't control, you know, what everyone's doing. And, I always like to say in FP and A, but one of our biggest job is risk management. And that also includes people who may just be running around doing a lot of things because truth be told, you know, a lot of you know, I like to say that FP and A is an enabler of business, but we don't sell things.

And so a lot of times, our budget owners, they're out there selling the product, marketing the product. And so, with that in mind, being able to always ensure that you're reaching out. So that's how I like to do things.

But the access control, keep it to a minimum and then giving a lot of leeway not leeway. Excuse me. But communicating the time frames of when things are gonna turn on and turn off so so that you have a, quote, unquote, fruitful discussion when you talk about the business operations.

Alright. Number five, implement backup and recovery planning. We just talked about it. You stole the thunder. Snapshots.

I love snapshots, and some people might not use that lingo. So, Yardi, in a second, I'll have you, do the not so Drew lingo of, snapshots or whatever we what what we wanna call it officially. But snapshots in my twenty year career have been an absolute lifesaver. And that's when you take financial information and you save it.

And you save it at a low enough level so that you can then use that and compare it to something else, like the next day for an accounting close or the next forecast, forecast to forecast, or versus a budget.

Or, you could do, different FX rates for a scenario and compare like for like. Like, when Brexit happened years ago, I had to rerun an entire company's financial model to understand what the FX impact was on revenue and profit and cash. I could do that in a matter of seconds, and it didn't take anything fancy. It was just snapshots, low enough level of details, and going back to what we talked about, very, very clean and simple accounts and departments and, information, that is just foundational, and doing things in a reporting cadence way so that when you take these snapshots, you understand when things are available, what's not in there, and you can tell that story throughout a month or a quarter. So, Yadi, you tell the story way better than me, but I remember back in the day, like, ten, fifteen years ago, we were working at the same place.

We had account we we got questions on the daily. How's profit and cash? And accounting would close the books, and we we would basically have to bridge what had happened from day to day as as management reviewed things, which we kinda recommended not to do. We changed it eventually.

But how do we use snapshots there? Because you you it was like an art the way you set it up. And it was like, any question we got, we could answer. So just take me through that process because that covered up a lot of close and forecast, that full gambit of, like, the the financial flow that we're used to every month.

Yeah. And I was gonna say for the more techie folks that are on the call today, you might hear the word archives, and it's just that's what it is essentially. You're taking a picture of your data at that given moment in time. And I remember, Drew, because, we've had times when when systems have broken down, but, thankfully, we had these snapshots where we can go back and understand, you know, where things were.

And to your point, you know, depending on the size of your company, your CFO or executives might ask for a daily walk. And so today, the systems are just so much better now. You have an archive button. You can literally snapshot your financials at that moment in time.

And so when you do your waterfalls, you can see what's moving. You can see that revenue spiking up, costs are going down, things like that.

But, yeah, I like I like the word snapshots better. But for, yeah, for the techie folks, yeah, you might hear it as archives.

We should we should trademark that. That's, gonna be trademarked by us.

Cool. Alright.

Alright. Next, wave so I guess next section. So data accessibility. So what role does it play?

Let's dive right into it. Alright. If you can click through the bullets, this is perfect. So, hey.

Guess what? It's the exact same bullets. Accuracy, trust, and speed. And, no, we weren't lazy in creating the same slide.

It's a very similar type theme, which, we'll get into in a second.

But accessibility equally as important as integrity. And, honestly, you can't without one or the other. You're not gonna get the full impact of having really good information to make ultimately decisions at your company. So let's, let's dive into it.

Alright. So, we have another poll. So, Alyssa, work your magic. And, what is your biggest challenge with data accessibility in your organization?

And I'm not allowed to vote because we're host. Okay. Let's let other people do it. We will we get to chime in with our voices. We have the power there.

What would you pick, Jim?

I think, I mean, all of them are pretty prevalent across the folks I talk to in personal experience, but the one that stands out for me is retrieval speed. Like, I'm gonna have access to the data, but getting it in the format, the slice, the view I need, unless I have, like, a preset up report that I kinda try to refresh manually every month. Right? That like, it's a huge manual exercise to get that in the view I want to help drive that analysis. So I would say speed.

There we go.

What do you got, Yadi?

I was gonna say the same thing, retrieval speed. You know, getting that information as quickly as you can, can be a challenge. And it kinda goes back to all the points you shared earlier, but, that that is definitely my number, which is surprisingly the number two here.

Yeah. I'm gonna go against you both. I'm gonna say data visualization. So the two people that voted that, you're awesome because I believe that because nowadays and, again, I love the it's a good debate.

Right? Speed stuff is available very quickly nowadays. I think we have an over the visualization part, I think it's over over overrevamped nowadays with, like, colors and multiple things and charts, and it's not consumable. And I've seen a lot of people spend time just trying to decipher, like, a where's Waldo painting of, like, what does this chart mean?

When it actually it's like, hey. All this data is accurate. It's relevant. It's trustworthy.

But I don't know what it means because it's not as simple as a car dashboard where it's like, it's one thing you're measuring on fuel gauge. So, that's my take on on on this. But, there's no right or wrong. Like, all of it's super important. Right?

Cool. Alright. Thanks, Alyssa, for the poll and everybody for participating.

Alright. So five quick wins to improve data accessibility.

Another fancy topic.

Alright.

So we're on a number six because we're doing ten things. Right? So, centralized data repository, number six. We wanna avoid this question, Jim. I'm sure you've never ever, ever, ever heard this question before in your career.

Tell us about it. Where does this data come from? Have you ever had that come up in a super high stakes executive meeting where it's like, I can't believe we're talking about this right now?

I mean, it comes up with with our customers every day. It also comes up just internally at Qube. Like, we recently put in a big initiative to have that second bullet point. Like, we created a definition, like, a data dictionary definition area, because I'll give you one example.

We were talking about win rates, and the question was, well, what win rate? And then, you know, is it win rate based on opportunities? Is it win rate based on sales qualified opportunities? Is it competitive win rate when we know they picked us or a competitor?

Like, all those things mean different, things to the business, and not having a clear definition meant we were spending spending time rehashing that in every meeting. So creating, like, a definition for each of these that we can always reference and have up on the side until we get used to the names and things like that. But that has helped us avoid confusion. It avoids that top question of where does this data come from because we all know, hey.

This rate is this divided by this from this system. Right? So happens all the time even just here internally at Qube. So definitely, definitely prevalent out there.

Cool. So we're no one's alone in that question. Perfect.

Alright. Number seven. Enhanced data visualization.

Less is more, focus on KPIs that matter. So this is where that picture, I've been there a million a million times. Like, you're pulling your hair out because there's either too many dashboards or, you don't know how to interpret it and interpret a dashboard. So, Jim, this is where I'm gonna judge you because I chose visualization before, but what do you look for when you see, a dashboard or information? Like, what does what does good look like to you as far as that goes and and just making business decisions and understanding what's going on with the business?

Yeah. And the key is your first bullet. Less is more. Right? It's really tempting when especially if you get, like, a nice dashboarding tool to, like, fire up as many visuals as you've been like, as you can.

Right? Oh, it'd be great if I could do this and this and this and this. Like, it always comes back to what are the most important KPIs that I either want my stakeholders to be thinking about or we as a team care about, and start with those.

And don't make this gigantic page where you have to scroll down three times in the bottom right corner, you find the chart you care about. Like, most important metrics should be top like, front and center, right at the top left of the page, highlighted, made larger than the other ones. And, sure, provide all that supporting detail and maybe on a separate dashboard, another page, but keep it simple. Keep it pointed to the areas that are most important to the business, and don't take that temptation to just provide everything under the sun to your team.

Perfect. And, number eight, improve data integration. So this is where FP and A, I'll speak for FP and A, because I'm technically, not a a CPA or an accountant, although got my accounting degree, but I think I struggle with this too. Like, we're over the years, to constantly get better and learn new tech and understand what's possible and how to speed up work, we lose sight of every day. And, it's not because we don't want to. I think we get caught up in the day to day and especially in, like, FP and accounting. It's in every every month, every week, there's something going on.

But the reality is nowadays and it's it's speeding up constantly. There are things like APIs that just help get information from one system to another or put it in one spot. And, Jim, I know you you've seen this more than me. How how have APIs and just data flow in general best practices changed? And what does it look like now, and how how should people take advantage of it, based on what's available to them?

Yeah. So first off, I I your second boat stands out, and the the keyword there I say was owners with the s on the back. Right? Make sure that for each of your source systems, you have at least kinda two people who know that because heaven forbid, you know, you're the CRM owner that, you know, is out on vacation and you can't get questions answered or the data query the way you want.

So having that owners in place is huge, but then you can alleviate some of that pain by implementing APIs and data integrations where it makes sense. Right? Because if you have data flowing from one spot to another without human intervention, you reduce the need for pinging that individual. You also reduce human error, which is just natural anytime you're dealing with data.

Like, I was doing my own personal finances, and I missed the filters on my bank statement thing that I spit out. And I was like, this looks wildly off is because I didn't filter. Right? Stuff like that happens all the time when you have humans involved, so you can speed up your processes, ensure more accuracy when you can invest in those integrations.

And I know there's usually a cost and time associated with those. But, usually, the earlier you invest in those, the more it's gonna help you down the road if you, you know, tear that Band Aid off right up front as opposed to waiting too long to, you know, invest in that integration.

Cool. Number nine, foster data driven culture. So this is where we're not gonna swear on this, but why the face should your stakeholders care? That's a, is that a modern family reference? I think so, but that was always a funny one.

So this is where finance for non finance education is absolutely paramount. And when they come into the company, when they're in the company, and as they progress through the company, people need to understand the financial scoreboard.

If they don't, then the goals that your company is is trying to achieve, which usually are rooted in financial or nonfinancial numbers like customers, they're not going to be achieved. So have you seen this before, Jim? Finance for non finance education, and, what what tips would you give people to that are trying to, like, get this off the ground, in their own company?

Yeah. I mean, we have a big emphasis on this internally at Qube around what are the core metrics to the business, why are those important to us.

Right? And then for individual teams and business units, what are the KPIs relevant for you? How can you impact those? And, really, you know, incentivize behavior, you know, just have people focused on those core metrics around those, and then that builds kind of the cadence you want for your business. But another big thing I see with really successful finance leaders I've worked with is being able to provide that nine non finance education.

Right? For example, implementation team wants a new headcount. Right? They come and ask for it from the finance team.

A good finance leader teaches them how to come ask. Right? Like, hey. In order to, you know, approve that, we're gonna need to know, like, your capacity plans and capacity assumptions for your team.

We're gonna wanna see a forecast for revenue. Right? Or is is our demand increasing? We need that extra head based on these capacity plans.

But so if you can teach your stakeholders how to think like a finance person, it's going to make all your discussions with them that much easier because, hopefully, they're even coming prepped with, you know, business cases and data to support what they're asking for.

And you can work with them to drive better insight and analysis into their business when they need help. So fostering that data driven culture and really enabling the non finance people to think like finance people can really, you know, expedite your team and and your business operations.

Nice. And number ten. Alright. This is the the big finish. So leverage cloud solutions. This is where you get into the combination of one source of truth and also that figurative, like, made up thing that is the cloud.

It's not made up. I used to work for a SaaS company. They took us to the server, the data center where the servers were. So before then, I didn't know what a cloud was.

And then, actually, I went in the cloud, which is a big server room with AC units. But this is where Jim, take us through the cloud. You know way more about this than me. How can our, FP and a and accounting professionals on the call leverage the cloud to their benefit?

Yeah. Absolutely.

And this can be my shameless plug for Qube because it helps with, lots of these, like scalability, creating one source of truth for finance data, minimal admin needed from IT teams, so on and so forth.

But there's tons of cloud applications that kinda serve these needs, and it really depends on what your team is looking for. Right? It might be a BI application that's serving this based on what you really need. Right? You can bring data into, like, a Tableau or a Power BI.

FP and a applications are great. Hence, Q. Right? And that's more when we need to incorporate our budget and forecast data, but we can also do operational and finance reporting and dashboarding and all that stuff and FP and A applications as well.

And sometimes it just might be, hey. I need a data repository on the cloud to store all of it, and that might be more where a data warehouse like a snowflake comes into play. So lots of different options in terms of bracing cloud solutions based on what your team is struggling with and what you need. But leveraging the cloud is so important because, you know, ten plus fifteen plus years ago when I started my career, there's always these huge, like, upgrades to on premise software, and it was so like, hearing my customers talk about it was just daunting.

They'd have months of buildup in meetings to when is this upgrade to this system gonna happen? What are all our contingency plans? When are our downtime's going to happen so people aren't gonna be in the system?

With cloud solutions, that's kind of a thing of the past. Right?

Organizations have optimized their software to be updated frequently with mineral mental minimal interaction. You have less IT resources needed to maintain those. So tons of benefits by embracing cloud solutions to help run your process.

Cool. And then, I guess, bring it all together. So we talked about data integrity and how clean data drives quality analysis. Right?

We talked about data accessibility, the too many cooks in the kitchen thing and making sure the right people have access, when they need it and you get the timing right. And, Jimmy talked about the tech and the cloud and data flows. And at the end of the day, it comes down to our human emotions of what's gonna keep us up at night or help us sleep better at night. And we've all been in that situation where data is, in a good place, and it may not even creep in your mind, which means you may sleep better, at night versus you know, that person tearing your hair out and dashboards are all over the place or down and data's all over the place.

You don't know what that means. And that usually is never fun to manage through. But you can if you're in that spot, if you follow very simple steps, and it will take time. It's not something that you're gonna fix overnight, but take those baby steps, best best in class approaches, and, you'll get to where you need to get to.

Yeah. So I think that, that summarizes up nicely. So where are we at now, Alyssa? We at the q and a? Perfect.

Yes. This is where I rejoin you.

Welcome back.

You all so much. You did an excellent job. This is very informative.

I hope everyone watching got a lot out of this.

So this is the part where I share the questions that people have been wondering about the entire time. So, one of the first ones I have here is about snapshots.

So you mentioned snapshots helping you speed up your reporting process.

Can you talk about an actual month end and how snapshots were used during that?

Oh, and, Johnny, chime in here too because you you know this too. But this is where when you close the books, you'll have, usually, you have, like, a work day, I don't know, three, five, and ten, drumbeat of, like, hey. First, usually close revenue.

So let's say you close revenue on the work day three, and you have revenue by product, by country, and a few other parameters. Take that information, snapshot it. Then you're gonna basically have a revenue story on the workday three that's ninety nine percent done. And then there's always gonna be things that change throughout your close, which is why you take the snapshot because you're gonna present something to leadership and say, hey.

I have relevant information very quickly and timely on revenue. Here you go. And then on the workday seven, you might have, like, expenses plus, revenue. And revenue might not have changed or might have changed.

And if it changed materially, you would be able to tell the difference between the two because you had a snapshot. So you had the version from the Workday seven compared to the Workday three, and you'd be able to tell your leadership, oh, by the way, we had a late adjustment to this product in this country because of this reason. So it doesn't change your story for nine of the ten bullet points, but this bullet point we told you about before, that needs to adjust versus somebody saying, what the heck happened? You already have the answer and the explanations.

And it doesn't just apply to revenue. You can do it for all the expense accounts. So, like, when accounting might book T and E first, and then they'll book salary second or whatever the flow is, you'll have that kinda, like, approach and take snapshots each day or each hour if you have things moving around.

But, yeah, that's how you use it throughout the account and close. And then when you do a forecast, same deal. You do a forecast and you're working on it one day. You load everything.

You say, cool. Here's my forecast as of the workday twenty. And then you might change people count, projections and say, we're actually gonna recruit more people here and speed that up. Load that in.

Well, your profit's gonna go down. Well, you wanna make sure that that was the only thing that changed. So take a snapshot and you compare the two, and you can see, oh, yeah. The only thing that changed was people count because of these changes.

So that's kinda like how you run the full gamut. I don't know, Yardi, if you have anything to add to that.

That was perfectly said, Drew. And I was gonna say, especially if you're at a public company where your CFO is getting ready to present the financials, he or she is trying to figure out their story. Right? And to your point, Drew, you're booking revenues, you're booking costs. You're just trying to figure out the story. And so they're trying to prepare for that call and these drumbeat archives or snapshots, if you will, which by the way, in very simple terms, it could be as simple as a copy paste special values in Excel sheet, or it could be a a CSV export and in your FP and A cloud solution tool.

But it's all about giving visibility to your leaders, to your CFO so that they have an idea of what they're gonna be presenting when they get to that call.

And to your point, Drew, it's you know, things change. Like, you never know. Especially with the forecast and budgeting process, people are gonna go up and down, up and down. And so it just gives comfort to your executives and teams.

And for those who are, you know, maybe at, you know, a strategy level, you might have heard things like capital allocation. You know, these snapshots help you to understand, hey. My cash is a hundred. Now it's two hundred. That's an incremental one hundred dollars that you can invest in different things like r and d, projects, marketing spend. And so it's just another way of just being able to see how things are changing from one period to the next, and giving ultimately comfort to your, stakeholders and executives.

Nice. Nicely said. I think we have time for a couple more.

So this next one's an interesting one. Is there a specific time of the calendar month or quarter that data governance must be called on the most?

I I guess it's like an ongoing thing. So there's, here's an example.

So let's say you're a software company and you ARR, annual current revenue, is your most important thing. Well, usually, that's based off of contracts, and contracts, you know, are done as of the last day of the prior month. So on June thirtieth, the last contract that's signed for the for the month of June is done. So July first, all your contracts are booked and ready to go.

So you should be able to review things like contracts and their life and the annual recurring revenue calculation that goes with it on the work day one. So that's an example of every work day one. If you're a SaaS company, you probably have your data champion looking at that. But you're also gonna have, like, an ongoing job because, like, I think Jim and already said, like, definitions.

Like, new things will pop up all the time. New definitions, new criteria for things, or updates to existing definitions. So there's always gonna be this ongoing maintenance thing going on with it. So, I would say definitely throughout the close, you'll probably have, like, very early in the month checks and balances and same with accounting with their own like, their financial close is a check and balance.

Right?

But it's definitely an ongoing, effort too. I don't know if you have anything to add to that, Jim.

I was gonna say, I think lack of data governance has probably exposed the most in those time frames. Right? So that's where you're gonna find all the stuff you need to, you know, dedicate data governance projects and things like that. It'd probably come up throughout it is ongoing.

Right? You're doing ad hoc queries during the middle of the month. Having those data governments, you know, processes in place ensures that, you know, the accuracy, the speed, the trust that you were mentioning before. So it's it to me, it's more when is it exposed when you don't have those good processes.

Nice. Alright. Looks like we're coming up on time, so I'll ask one more.

This one, I'm assuming is about Qube. So I'll ask Jim, what are the main points that set your solution apart from competitors?

Yeah.

For those who aren't in the KnowCube is a spreadsheet native FP and a application. So we're taking, advantage of a cloud based database using integrations like we were talking about before to bring data in, which is very similar to most of the other FP and A applications in the space.

But with KeyBar kind of hallmarks and calling cards are gonna be the ease of use. So that speed at which you can interact with your data and generate reports and plan and budget is probably the biggest thing.

The low need for IT investment, whether it's your internal IT resources or investing in consulting to set up your models, your reports, is gonna be a big one. And then cube meets teams where they work. So that's gonna be in spreadsheets. Whether it's GSheets or Excel, we integrate with both.

Even if your team uses both, you can continue to use both. If your finance team is using Excel and the rest of your team, collaborates within Google Sheets, we enable to utilize your spreadsheets as kinda your interface into your data. You're just removing all of your vlookup, sumifs, index matches, import ranges that give you so much heartburn and kinda just hang over you like a big black cloud during month end and during your budget cycles.

Well, what a way to end it. So no to Hartford.

Thank you all so much. This has been really helpful.

Like I mentioned before, everyone, you are going to receive an email after this, with the recording and the slides. So if you have any questions that pop up after this, webinar, just feel free to reply, to the email that we send you with the questions that you have, and we'll make sure that somebody gets back to you with some answers.

But before we let you go, we have a couple of resources for you. So first is the FP and HEY LinkedIn page. If you like what you heard from Ju and Yardi and you wanna hear more from them, go ahead. Follow them on LinkedIn. Send them a message. I know they'd be more than happy to connect with you.

Next is a custom Qube demo. If you like what you heard about Qube, or you're going through this entire webinar and you're thinking, this is great, but how am I actually gonna do this? And you wanna know how cute can be helpful to you, go ahead and request a custom demo, and we'll answer all of your questions there.

Third is our biweekly newsletter, The Finance Fix. This is written by our founder and CEO, Christina Ross, who is also a former three time CFO.

And so she is just full of so much finance knowledge, and she has connections to a lot of people in the space. And she features their thoughts, and observations in her newsletter every other week, and so it's chock full of insights. And I highly recommend subscribing to that. And then lastly, we have our strategic finance pros Slack community.

This community is made up of a lot of like minded finance and FP and A professionals. So if you ever just wanna bounce ideas off of each other, ask people questions, provide advice, find job openings, events in your area, and of course content that's exclusive to community members, this is the place for you. So highly recommend, signing up for the community as well. And with that, I think we are all done for the day.

Thank you so much to our speakers. This has been awesome, and thank you everyone for joining. Be sure to keep an eye on your email for those resources I mentioned, and have a great weekend. We'll see you next time.

10 quick wins to improve your financial data management

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