Webinar
AI-Powered Collaboration in Cube: Workflows, Analysis, & Accountability
See how cube’s ai-powered collaboration features help fp&a and strategic finance leaders align faster and drive clarity, ownership, and action across the business.
Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. Before we officially get started, I just wanna go over a couple of quick housekeeping items. So first is our live q and a. Throughout this webinar, you're probably gonna have a lot of questions that come up. Down in your toolbar, there is a q and a option. We suggest that you use that to submit all of your questions because at the end of the webinar, we're gonna have a block of time reserved specifically for answering questions. And any questions that we don't get to during today's webinar are gonna be compiled and sent to you in a document following the webinar. So anything you wanna know, be sure to submit it. And that actually leads me into my next point, which is the recording and slides. Everything you see today is gonna be recorded, and sorry, not slides, resources. There's a slide at the end where we've compiled a few resources that are relevant to today's session that we think are gonna be useful to you. So be sure to keep an eye on your inbox following the session for the recording, all the resources, and the live q and a. And now to introduce today's speakers. First is Suresh, who is our chief product and technology officer at Qube. When it comes to the AI powered collaboration suite that we're gonna be talking about today, and just FP and A software in general, Suresh has a ton of great insights and is really leading the charge there. So we're really lucky to have him on today's call. And next is Taylor, who is a senior product marketing manager here at Qube. And before actually moving into her current role, she was on our solutions team. So she's done a lot of walk throughs of our product. She knows it like the back of her hand, and she's the perfect person to help walk through the AI powered collaboration suite today. So without further ado, Taylor, Suresh, I'm gonna hand things off to you. Stop sharing my screen. Great. Thanks for those intros there, Alyssa, and thanks everybody for joining today's webinar. We're really excited to get started here. Where I wanted to kick things off today is just by addressing that there's been a ton of excitement about Qube's summer release. You may have received some emails about these feature releases. Maybe you've seen the press releases or LinkedIn posts. So, Suresh, I just wanted to start off by asking you first and foremost, what did Qube exactly announce in this release? Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Taylor. Yeah. Summer release was a big one, for us. This is actually in the process of being rolled out. And the the kind of the goal of this release was we know for a fact that finance teams collaborate with every part, every department, every function as part of their planning, reporting, analysis processes. So that's that's a reality. And our goal was how do we truly support, the finance teams from doing that in a way that's that's effective, that's efficient, and that's scalable. So the way we approached it is already along these four major features or capabilities, that you're showing on the screen here. The first one was granular access controls. The goal was that, to enable finance teams to be able to invite, non finance teams, business stakeholders, you know, executive teams into Qube to be able to kinda share data with them. There needs to be very precise controls on the data so there isn't any inadvertent leakage of data. So how do we do that? So that was a granular access control. The second one is make it easy for non finance stakeholders to interact with their own data within Qube. So web reporting is like a browser based reporting interface, makes it easy for you to consume information while on a browser. The third thing was workflows, especially for, like, your annual budgeting process or your headcount planning process or some of those bigger processes that you might run on a annual or quarterly or a monthly basis. How do you actually, have a notion of a workflow, have tasks, be able to assign tasks to people, be able to follow-up on them, so that if things get done on time. So that was the third thing. And kind of bringing it all together is our conversational AI. This is something actually, that we talked about earlier as well. How do we enable especially the, the senior leadership team, maybe the department leaders, all all the different stakeholders, for financial plans and financial data to be able to just converse with Qube, using AI, get the information that they need, which is all kind of, you know, supported by the data that's sitting in queue, and then still have the seamless conversation interaction. So so big release, really excited about how it's gonna get used. But, yeah, this is this is exciting stuff. Awesome. Very exciting. And last question here before I start diving into things, Suresh. What was kind of the main impetus for launching this full suite of features? Yeah. No. That that's a great question. And, so as we've been talking to our customers, right, like, one of the things that our customers have told us time and again is they really like this twin approach that that cube has, that we have a robust, multidimensional, model with a data behind it in the cloud. So that helps you really scale and perform analysis at scale. And then they like the fact that there is a really spreadsheet in, the spreadsheet interface by which you can actually interact with it, which is really kind of easy to use, lightweight, and yet it it scales to all this large and complex dataset. So so that when the twin machine, I guess, twin engine works really well. But this question comes up. Right? Hey. This all was great in the context of my analysis and my planning, but help me figure out how I can collaborate with the rest of the organization. And if the rest of the organization isn't as comfortable or as tuned in with with spreadsheet like interfaces, are there better ways by which we could just collaborate with the rest of the organization? So that that was basically the starting point. That was the impetus. And then as we talk through that entire flow and entire use case, that that's where we came up with, look, all of these things need to kind of line up. And and so that's how we started. So we'll we'll obviously go more over it, but those four things I was just talking about, are all intended to help finance teams, administrative teams, run planning processes, analysis processes, bring in all the stakeholders and then bring it all together. And because at the end of the day, if you think about it, there's a lot of intelligence sitting in different parts of the organization, and the ability to just bring that all together, bring it all, and then show make it show up in in kind of the overall financial analysis is a key aspect. Awesome. Super helpful. So let's start diving into this. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here again. And where I wanna kinda center this conversation today is why we release these features and sort of how that ties into what strategic finance teams need to accomplish. We like to think of the strategic finance organization as kind of modeling off of this pyramid, where first and foremost, you have to make sure that you're handling your data correctly, that there's security around that data, that things are accurate within your system before you can start thinking about things like reporting, planning, and whatnot. And the way that we've really enhanced that data management component within Qub through this feature release is via user management and user security access. To walk you through that here, I'm in my queue right now, and we're on this user management page, which has been updated to have much more customized options now. First and foremost, we have this user type section within the security page where you can set up multiple types of user groups and customize those according to which features in Qube you want those groups of people to have access to. So for example, in my Qube, I have this department collaborators group. And when we open up the properties of this group here, you're gonna be able to see that these are more so budget owners or maybe forecasters across different departments who shouldn't necessarily have access to edit things from an admin level perspective in queue. So you'll see that on things like dashboards and reports. These folks only have view level access to those items in queue. For other items like workflow, they're able to work within their assigned tasks, but they're not necessarily managing that workflow, and they cannot edit any dimensions, formulas, and things like that. Now on the flip side of that, we may wanna also Yeah. Sorry. If I could just interject there as well, Taylor. So, the the power of this, team is that these are all managed by finance teams or administrative teams depending on how you're organized. So these things like department collaborators and department heads, these are all, like, basically custom to you. It's just a mirror of how you organize. And and they are like you said, what this really is is a way to control which, for this group, what access they have within cube, and you can just assign users to them. And then that'll that'll basically ensure that they can only perform the actions within queue that they need to that they're allowed or authorized to perform. Sorry. Go ahead. Absolutely. No. Yeah. That's great insight there. And something to call out too in terms of that customization is that you don't necessarily have to set up specific user types per department or per entity, because if you're planning on having those collaborators or department heads access the same features in Qube, you can set these kind of holistic groups rather than making all of these separate sales leaders, marketing leaders groups. And what really makes this more powerful is the data access that you're gonna start assigning those different groups. So to walk through that data access component, you can set up a really customized data access groups now within Qube, such as maybe the Australian marketing team, the US sales team, or sales leaders. So these, again, are all completely customizable just like those user types are. And if we wanna dig into some of the properties of one of these groups as well, maybe I'll pick on this Australian sales team, we can open up these settings, and we're gonna be able to see that within these permissions, this data group only has access to the sales department. They also only have access to the Australian entity. They can edit data within those dimensions, but they're not able to see or edit data across any other dimension. So we can easily add that permission if we want to, but this is really giving you that focused experience of setting those permissions however you need to in your business. Yeah. And this this one, as well, is is really powerful because with this, what you can do is you can be as precise or as course as you want in terms of what access you give to a set of users. Right? You could in this particular example, you could be very specific about, hey. It's the sales department for Australia entity that is these sort of users will have edit access to. But it could be even more precise if you want down to entity, product, market, whatever the your structure is. So it just becomes a matter of, of your business needs, right, like, about how precise you want to get, in terms of the access and how much of it is edit versus view. The system will will adhere automatic automatically based on that. And then the last point I've had I wanted to make is we wanna do it in a way that it is very granular, it is very precise, but at the same time, it's easy to use. So so that's why this whole thing about having a simple way of of of managing it and and having it in gross. The goal was really to to continue to make it easy to use, easy to understand, but then provide you as our as our users just, you know, very precise controls on how you want to, control access, to the system. Absolutely. And kind of the final piece of the puzzle here is once you've set up those user types and those data access groups, now it's time to actually start assigning people to those groups. And we've made that much easier in Kube now as well. All you'll need to do is click invite user once you set up those groups. You can add multiple email addresses at once here, and then select those user types and that data access you want to assign, and that way you're not having to assign those permissions per user individually, especially as your business scales. This is gonna make that a lot faster. Exactly. And and the goal again was how do we make it as easy as straight straightforward for you to be able to collaborate with your, business counterparts, with your senior leadership team, all the different stakeholders across the process our planning process, and and do it in a way that's easy to manage. And this is exactly kind of nothing just reflects that that intent. Hundred percent. Perfect. Well, flipping back to these slides here, just to recap what we've covered there in terms of security, the updates that we've made have really been intended to help teams apply more precise tailored controls across their business. The goal here is really to also just simplify that administration of Kybe as well, especially for teams who are growing, inviting maybe dozens of users to their model every month or every year. And lastly, supporting hybrid teams more effectively is the goal here as well. Teams who might have view level access to one department, write back access to another. This is making the approach of adding that security a lot easier. Once all of your data has really been securitized in Kyub, and you've really tackled that data management layer of this pyramid, it's now time to start thinking about things like reporting and analysis. And what we've really done to enhance that process within Qube is launch our web reporting features. So to walk you through that here, I'm gonna open up one of my models today. And this is a model that was set up by an FP and A manager within Excel. So the model we're looking at here is a marketing forecast versus actuals report. We're looking at accounts that are really relevant to the marketing team, trailing three years of our forecast and our historical actuals, and we have some variance calculations down below that are giving us important insights across our business. Now the FP and A manager is really comfortable working within spreadsheets, and that's where they tend to want to set up their models, but they also understand that other departments in their company may prefer to work in a more structured web environment. And with our launch of web reporting, we've made that possible. What the FP and A manager can do here is simply highlight any existing reports that they've established and set up once in spreadsheets. And now in the cube sidebar, they're able to save that as a web report within cube. Yeah. And and just to add to what what you're saying, Taylor, so the the report that that that this person, this FP and A manager has created, obviously, has data that's coming from Qube. So the top section that is coming from Qube, and then the bottom sections potentially maybe are formulas, right, like local Excel formulas by which they want to calculate various percentages and so on. But, like, the ability to kind of lay this out, with with local calculations and with cube data that's coming in directly from cube and the ability to have, you know, whatever. I left the the title of the page and the colors and the fonts and and a number formatting. All of that is leveraging what what we all know with which is with Excel and and Google Sheets, etcetera, are really, really good at. So this this report is is, I think, tailored, I guess, in this case, to whatever, the user wants to show. Absolutely. And to show that experience of actually interacting with this report in the web, we can simply click view report here, right within that cube sidebar, and this is gonna pull up that exact same report in the cube workspace or the cube web platform. So as Suresh mentioned, this is displaying all of the same formatting, all the same fonts, our formulas are calculating accurately here within the Q workspace. And if I'm somebody like maybe the head of the Australian marketing department, for example, I can go into this report in Qube. I don't have to touch spreadsheets at all, and I can now start slicing this report by my business. I can pick my entity. I can fetch my data just like I can within that spreadsheet sidebar, and you're gonna see all of these numbers update according to my dimensionality that I have access to. Yeah. Exactly. And I think that this is really the the power of it. The ability for, finance or really any user who has who has whom you have been privileged to to be able to design the report in spreadsheets, but then have it rendered faithfully on the browser so that now you can both review it on the browser, you can share it with other people who can, who can all review the same information directly from a structured browser interface. Is, I think, a really powerful thing. And just to kind of tie back to what you were saying earlier, Taylor, as well, like, this one will still obviously adhere to all of those data access rules and the access controls that we talked about earlier. So, it will it will make sure that the user as as this goes from person a to person b to person c, that all of those, access privileges and and rules are are adhered to. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, to recap all of those kinda key benefits of web reporting within q, back to these slides here, the goal is really to enable all teams to work where they're comfortable. Finance is probably most comfortable in spreadsheets, whereas maybe marketing, sales, operational departments prefer that web experience. And with this, we're really creating more structure for those operational teams, where they're not working in spreadsheets that they could potentially make changes in. They're working out of reports and models that finance has set up one time for them. And lastly, the goal here too is to retain all that flexibility and customization that spreadsheets offers. So any formulas and formatting that you've set up in your spreadsheets will be mirrored exactly in the Q web platform. Now once we've covered reporting and analysis, we've really gotten that locked down within a system, it's now time to evolve into planning and modeling. And one of our really highly requested features in this area of the finance pyramid has been workflow. How do I assign tasks to users? How do I capture those activities in my business? And that's part of this summer feature release here that we'll dig into next. So to walk through this, we're gonna go back into queue, and I'm gonna be wearing the hat of maybe an FP and A manager today. Now as an FP and A manager, I've been tasked with setting up a monthly reforecasting process in my company, and I can set up that workflow now within queue. When I click into that workflow, you're gonna see that there are multiple tasks that I've set up already and assigned to specific users in my company. Some of these tasks were assigned to Pam Beasley, who is part of our marketing department. She has to review her marketing spend first, then I want her to reforecast her operating expenses, and lastly, I want Pam to review all of those forecast variances after she's made those inputs. And on the flip side of that, I've also assigned some tasks to Liban, who's on our sales team. Liban needs to review his sales revenue, reforecast his sales opportunities, and just like Pam, I want him to also review his sales forecast variances. And in this workflow, I've also set up some tasks at a more administrative perspective for myself to review the global p and l after Pam and Lee Van have made their inputs and review an overall expense dashboard. Yeah. And the last oh, sorry. Go ahead, sir. I was just gonna chime in here, Taylor, just to say that, the the the basic building blocks here that that you're walking us through, Taylor, really is this notion of a workflow. Right? Workflow is, hey. This is a fundamentally reforecasting that that's that's all controlled and managed by finance teams. And then those workforce have tasks, and tasks are assigned to people. And then there's a due date, and, you know, you can you can do things with it. The the point that I was gonna make is that this is all, owned and managed by finance teams. It's not like there is some rigid structure that you have to follow. Like, this is as light and as flexible as it needs to be to kind of be tailored to the specifics of of your teams, your processes, your stakeholders in the processes, and how granular you wanna get. For sure. And speaking of that ownership and that management, we've really intentionally built this to be super easy to own and create new tasks and workflows. As that FP and A manager, if I wanna add a new task here, I can just click this Add Task button. I can give that task a name, like review, inventory report. I can assign that to somebody within my cube. I can set a due date for that task as well, even attach things like any of those web reports that we saw earlier, or maybe dashboards that I built in cube, or even files that I've uploaded to the cube library. And once all of those tasks have been set up within Qube, now I can actually start shipping these tasks to these users. The way we're gonna do that is just selecting all of these items here. We can mark this as a to do status. And when I click apply, this is going to send off notifications to all of these users here that they have a task to complete within Qub. Those users are now gonna receive an email, and that's gonna link them right back to their workflow task management pane where they can start checking off all of these activities and moving through these tasks. So to show you that perspective here, I have another window open, and in this window here, I'm operating as maybe Pam Beasley, who's that marketing manager, who had those three tasks three tasks assigned to her. As we look at these tasks here, maybe I'm gonna click on this first one, which is review marketing spend. And as mentioned, when I click on that link, this is now going to pull up my workflow task view right within Qube, taking me exactly to that review marketing spend report. And something important to call out here is that we've intentionally applied all of that security that we were talking about at the beginning of today's session. So that Pam, if she's trying to filter on total departments or the total company, is not gonna get holistic access to the company's data. She's only gonna be able to view the data that she has permission to see, like in the marketing department. When we select that specific department and pick one of the entities that she has access to and fetch back the data, we are now gonna see this entire report populate with her forecasted values, her actuals, and again, all of those variance calculations outputs here. Yep. It's exactly the same web report we talked about earlier. The nice thing with with this layout is for Pam Beasley, who might only come in, whatever, once a quarter or once a year or whatever, you know, frequency that she needs to come in. Her experience needs to be a very simple steps, one, two, three, and then you're done, which is exactly the layout here. Right? Like, she has three tasks to do. She can just go through these tasks. And when she clicks on a task, it gives her instructions. And these instructions are all, you know, with type typed in by the finance team or the owner of the process. It shows the data that she needs to review opportunities to perform action on. She could perform her action, move on to the next task, then, you know, as as make it as simple as prescriptive as possible so that especially non finance teams who who may or may not have, the you know, do they have so many other things to do? They may not want to be spending too much time on this to make their ability to participate in the process and give the inputs that data data from their side, make it as simple as possible while still getting all the information in a timely fashion for finance team so you can bring it all together to to do it. Yeah. One hundred percent. And speaking of interacting with the finance team, once Pam has finished any of her activities, she can go ahead and mark that task as done. And now finance is going to receive a notification that Pam has completed that activity. They can go ahead and perform their reviews, and Pam can now move into her next tasks. Maybe her next task is something like reforecasting her OPEX. In this case, Pam prefers to make her inputs in Google Sheets, so we can link those GSheets templates right within this workflow. Pam can fill out any inputs that she wants to make. Maybe she's gonna increase her forecast for paid ads since, we spent a lot more on that in the previous quarters. Maybe we're gonna just add an extra ten thousand dollars, And just like existing Kube customers know, and maybe prospects who have seen demos of Kube, we can now interact with that Kube sidebar in Google Sheets to push this data back to Kube. And as soon as Pam has written this data back to Kube, she can go ahead, go back to her workflow, and now she can start reviewing any variance reports that she's been assigned. So if Pam is looking at her forecast versus her updated q two reforecast, maybe she's in that US entity, she can go ahead and fetch the data back here within this report, and we're gonna see on that paid ads line that there's now a variance resulting from that input. Yeah. So this is this is the really powerful part is that all of the data still continues to be centralized. All the data is available. So it doesn't matter whether on a spreadsheet, whether on a browser. You get the data, obviously, filtered only to what you can see, like you were telling with this particular user. And to be able to do it all in this simple steps one, two, and three, just makes it easier for all the stakeholders to participate. So yeah. Absolutely. And to close the loop on this, flipping back to that FP and A manager role here, if I'm that FP and A manager who is looking at these workflows, I'm now gonna be able to see that the workflow that Pam was completing tasks in is in progress. There's one task completed here. Once all of those other tasks have been completed in this workflow, I can now click on something like my global P and L review as this high level admin perspective, and this is going to display for me the entire company's operations. Maybe we're looking at trailing quarters here, analyzing our current quarter against that quarterly reforecast, and this is a much more broad overview of how the entire business is doing versus Pam's view, which is really just filtered down to her team, her entity, and department. Yeah. Completely. Yep. Awesome. And once that FP and A manager is done, they can check off that entire workflow, mark it as completed, and we finished that entire cycle, and everybody has stayed consistently in sync throughout throughout that whole process. And just to recap kind of some of these benefits here one more time. Again, the goal of launching this workflows feature in kube is really to keep finance and all of those other operational teams in sync in one platform. That ability to notify users and track their tasks is giving finance more oversight into processes like budgeting cycles and reforecasting, And we're really just helping to standardize that collaboration process versus having everyone working in offline spreadsheets that you have to wrangle together. Yeah. And this is something that actually we heard from multiple, customers is really especially for their larger processes, I guess, right, for the annual planning and budgeting process. So maybe it's a reforecasting process, but you're actually involving multiple stakeholders. Anytime like that kind of scenario happens, at least consider this. So take a look at this, play around with this. It'll be great to get your feedback. But I think this will be a good tool to bring the data and the people and the process, all of it together in one place in a one seem kind of a seamless manner, to make it as, frictionless as possible across the organization. Absolutely. And that takes us right to the top of this pyramid, which is the goal of every finance team to become more strategic and become that strategic finance org. And the way that we have really approached this within cube and built enhancements around this is through AI, specifically conversational AI in Slack and Teams. So to walk you through this here, I'm gonna pull up my Slack chatbot right now, and I'm gonna be wearing the hat of a CFO today. Maybe we're one month into that reforecasting process, and I wanna know how is marketing trending against their forecasted spend last quarter. I can go ahead and type out that question in plain language right in Slack or in Teams, and this AI chatbot is going to give me really precise results about that data. So what we're gonna see here within these results is that the cube chatbot has analyzed all of the data within my cube model and provided a lot of really detailed contextualized responses, showing me what my actual spend was, what my forecasted spend, giving me that sixteen percent variance that I had against my forecast. It's even breaking down some key findings, showing me where my largest variance occurred, where I was just slightly over my forecast, and even taking some root cause analysis, like maybe the spend may warrant a deeper investigation into our budget adherence, especially in paid advertising. And this is by the way, this is something that I really, I'm a big fan of because it it really does couple of things here. Right? Like, the user can ask a question like you said, like, Taylor, you you are the CFO, persona here. You're asking this question. And the with with our AI enabled engine, we are not only answering it, but they're also providing kind of the the why the the, what do you call it, the the what the how behind it. But it's so it's not a black box answer. It wasn't just here is the answer. It's a little bit more about here are the numbers that go into it. So here is how you should here is how we came up with it. And like you're showing here on the table here, it's actually going back to cube and getting the actual data that it used to prepare the answer. So that everybody, right, including Qube and and the and the user, there's there's clarity about how we arrived at the numbers. And if there is any question marks on the numbers, at least everybody knows where the information is coming from. So it's it's not a black box, the answer. So this is really exciting, I think. Absolutely. Yeah. And what I really like about this too is that you can always download that data too and take it back to spreadsheets if you prefer to work there, or the CFO could take these results and forward them to somebody within the company, like maybe that FP and A manager right within Slack. And then they could tell that FP and A manager to set up another workflow in queue, rerun that reforecasting cycle with marketing, and really keeping all those teams aligned going forward. Absolutely. Yeah. And a nice thing as well is all of this still adheres to that, access controls we talked about at the beginning. So you can only ask questions to the data for the data that you have access to, and it will not let you ask questions about something that you don't have access to. So all of that still applies. Mhmm. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, that takes us back to that slide again. And just to cover off on all of those key benefits here, you know, the goal of launching that conversational AI is to really help deliver speedier results in the familiar tools that teams know and love, Slack and Teams. Additionally, automating that context and analysis that may have previously been really time consuming to glean out of spreadsheets was the goal here as well. And finally, enhancing decision making. You know, part of strategic finance is taking all the data that you have and truly taking action on it, and AI can really help you with that digestion of that data and making those decisions faster. Well, with all that being said and all of these exciting new features here, the thing I really wanna ask you, Suresh, is what's next for Qube and on the road map? Yeah. So on our side, the the momentum is going to continue. What you should expect from us is we'll continue we're going to continue, kind of reaching out to you, proactively learning, kind of, what's working, what's not working, continue to strengthen our core platform. So our our journey is is going to continue. We're very excited about, what we consider as the overall FP and A process. This is a good reflection. This pyramid is a very good reflection of the entire spectrum of FP and A processes and workforce. How do we make sure that Qube can provide you the complete, experience across all of it while making sure that it's easy to use, it's flexible, it's fast. And now with with with the advent of AI, it's also intelligent. Like, that those are the four kind of pillars that we think about, and and to deliver that in a way that's, that that completes that direct training process and supports it, for your organizations. Excellent. And if today's audience could take just a few things away from today's session, what would you say that would be? Yeah. So my ask of the audience would be very simple. Hey. Please play around with these. I think these are really interesting things that, we've thought hard about and we've built out. We would love to get your feedback on it. We would love to get your feedback on what else we could be doing, how we could be improving this. We'd love to partner with you on this. If you're a prospect who's considering Qube, please do reach out to us, ask for a one on one demo. We can walk you through this and other capabilities of in within Qube. And and and all of this is being built with that thesis that I was talking about that we wanted to be easy to use, flexible, and fast, and then intelligent as well. So so so we would love to, in kind of, learn from you. We would love to partner with you as we continue to evolve this platform and take it to the next level. Perfect. Thanks so much, Suresh. Well, that's it for slides for me. I think at this point, I'll pass things over to Alyssa to kind of cover next steps and resources that you can take away from today's webinar. Yeah. Thank you, Taylor. So first, access the ideas portal. So for any customers that are on the call today and, you know, if you're in Qube thinking, man, you know, I really wish that this existed, or wouldn't it be cool if I could do this? That's exactly what the ideas portal is for. We highly encourage you to go in there, leave your ideas. We're actively going in there scanning for things that we can do to make our product better. You're also gonna see posts from other people just like you who are leaving their own ideas. And if you see something you like, you can upvote it, and that'll signal to us that lots of people are looking for these particular features. So definitely check that out. Next is the finance fix. That's our biweekly newsletter. This is essentially a how to guide for how to get closer to achieving strategic finance. We know that that's a goal for many, if not all, finance professionals, and the goal of the finance fix is to help you get there. So for tips and tricks all relating to strategic finance, be sure to check that out. And lastly, if you are a prospect on the call who is not yet using Qube, if you've seen things today that you like that you wanna dive even further into or have specific use cases that we didn't cover today that you'd like to see, demoed for you, we encourage you to book an in-depth custom demo with one of the members of the Qube team. We would be very excited to walk you through the product. And so with that, I believe we are onto our q and a portion, and I'm very excited for this because we've had a lot of questions come in. So we definitely won't get to all of them. But as I mentioned before, you're gonna receive the answers to every single question following the webinar, so don't worry. Alright. So I will start from the beginning. So first, how do these new business collaboration users work within your allotted user count in Qube? For example, I believe we have user licenses for four finance team members. Would additional business users impact that user count? So the the the way the tool works is, yes, these these would all be users in cubes. So you would have to create these users in cubes so you can share with them because at the end of the day, we also want make it secure. So we want to make sure that we know who has access to what and what privileges they have. So they will they will count against your users. So but but we our goal is to make this as frictionless as possible. So please do reach out to your account managers, if you have any questions about your account and limits and things like that, and they can definitely work with you and help you out with that. Awesome. Next question. What does the, quote, save slash create as a new report, unquote, for browser sharing do with grouped or hidden columns and rows? That actually is a good question. I'm not sure I know the answer, Taylor. Do you know? Yeah. I believe that it does actually reflect whatever hidden rows you had hidden in your spreadsheet. So it'll appear the same way on the cube web platform once you've saved that as a web report. You know, I know we're constantly making enhancements to that too. So if that isn't necessarily the case today, that will be eventually. But, yeah, the goal is really to retain everything that has been set up in spreadsheets and preserve that as is. Awesome. Alright. Next one. Can we create a new report on the web portal and export to cube? Can we Yeah. So the idea is that you're creating the reports from spreadsheets first and then bringing them into the web portal. But within the Qube web portal, you can create things like dashboards. You can create things like even, you know, table views within those dashboards of data. So they're not just charts. They're more like data outputs, and you can export those if you want to as well and take them, you know, into a presentation or something. K. Next question. In the web based reports, can a user add comments, edit, or drill down specifically regarding the review marketing spend example given? It's a it's a really good question. So, that is something that we're working on right now. So this is gonna be coming soon. The ability to actually edit it, ability to add comments, maybe it's another column on the right hand side where you can just type in text. So that that is going to come drilled down is something that we're working on. So we'll continue to we'll continue to in in enhance this. And the goal is exactly what you were describing, the the ability to do all of that. Awesome. Is it an additional cost per user if you're adding executives to be able to see these reports within Qube? Good question. I'm I'm not sure. So this is something maybe as if you were to reach out to your account manager, they can they can work with you on this. I think that's probably the best way of doing it. Yeah. Cool. Next one, two questions. Will we be able to set tasks to recur? Also, at some point, will there be an option to publish from a web report, or will that always remain in Excel slash sheets? It's a great it's a great question. On the first one, on terms of recurrence, the idea was to make it simple to just be able to copy it. So so maybe we could also consider recurring. So this might be a conversation we would love to have with our customers on this. We were thinking that if it just make it simple to just duplicate tasks and duplicate, entire workflows, then that might be much more efficient in many ways than to have something that's that's recurring, and then you have to manage it in terms of how you know, when it when it runs and what frequency and all that. So so both both are possible. Right now, we are going down the task of making it as, going down the path of making it as simple as to duplicate tasks, duplicate workflows, and then that'll become kind of a starting point for the next one. Would love would love to get feedback from from this team once once you played around with it in terms of which which pay which way you think we should go. K. Alright. Next one. Let's see. With the Slack AI, can a business owner ask for an analysis on a vendor level? For example, could someone ask, can you give me a breakdown of my software variance by vendor, or could they ask, what is my remaining travel budget for the remaining for the remainder of the quarter? The answer is yes. The only the only caveat there is, like, you you have to have set it up that way. Right? Like, you have to organize cubes so that vendor is a dimension, I think, in this example. So if you have it, if it has the information, then that's it. Right? It's as simple as asking it, a question in plain plain English and then being able to get answers to it. And it can answer things like, yeah, how much should I spend year to date? How much is year to go? How much budget do I have left? And it will perform the arithmetic, that's needed to give you the answer. Awesome. Again, by the way, on the same same same thing applies to that as well. We would love to get your feedback on it. So as you play around with it and all of you have all these different questions you ask it, that's the way the software works. As you know, AI works is it it it it's, like, learning from all of this, and it's getting better. But we can also train it. So we would love to get your feedback on, hey. You got this wrong. Okay. So that'll be a good thing for us to go figure out what happened. But it it from all of our testing that we have been doing, it's it's been, it's been very good at answering questions very precisely. Awesome. Alright. Let's see. I think we have time for maybe two more. Can web reports integrate charts, or will those remain in dashboards? It will it will remain in dashboards. So that's the current thing. You have dashboard, which have all the charting and graphing, and then there's web report, which is much more for tabular data that you will want to have tailored designs on. There is a broader project that we do want to take on. Again, we'd love to collaborate with all of you on that, to bring the two closer together. How do we bring the the dashboarding and this web reporting? Maybe put it all part of one canvas, if you will, where you have charts and graphs and these these kinds of web reports. This is something that we are actively considering. Would love to would love to have conversations with with folks who have thoughts around it, who have any ideas around it. We have some some thoughts, I think, but we would love to love to learn from from all of you as well. Awesome. Alright. And then the final question before we wrap up. I saw you planning for marketing expenses at a higher level. Is it possible to plan in more detail, like, by event? Yeah. That's a really great question and something we get asked about a lot. Answer is yes. You definitely can plan by event, by detailed items for really any item that you're planning for in queue, and I actually do have a good example of this that's pulled up right now. Let's get into that other tab here. But, yeah, where you saw me planning for paid ads just at that GL account level, I actually have another tab called t and e where I am planning for events exactly. So we're looking at our travel expense account here. These are all of our cube dimensions that we're planning within, the marketing department, the US entity. But off to the right of that, we also have some more granular details like trip descriptions, maybe there's events like conventions and conferences, destinations. These can all get flagged as attribute level details in our models, and then we can publish all of the resulting data back into cube right from the spreadsheet. And that gives you the ability to start drilling down into those details from other models that are maybe looking at just high level travel expenses. Great. Thank you, Taylor. Yeah. Thank you, Suresh. I think that wraps up questions for now. Like I mentioned, we had a whole bunch come in, so we're gonna make sure that we answer them all and get them all out to you following the call. Just wanna thank everyone for being here today. Thank you again, Suresh and Taylor, and be sure to keep it an eye on your inbox for more resources, the recording, all that good stuff, and we hope to see you next time. Have a good one. You. Thanks, everyone. Bye.
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Move faster with aligned teams and clear next steps.
Cube’s new AI-powered collaboration features make it easy for FP&A and strategic finance leaders to turn insights into action.
In this exclusive walkthrough with Chief Product & Technology Officer, Suresh Bala, you’ll see how to:
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Streamline budgeting with workflows and task tracking
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Collaborate in real time on shared reports and forecasts
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