Video Transcription
Alright. Let's get right into it. Today's session will be led by Tyler Higashi.
Now Tyler was is a solution architect here at Qube, and he has years of experience in FP and A starting his career as a consultant for Oracle. In addition, he was a freelance data consultant specializing in Excel, where he helped clients navigate the process of report creation and planning cycles using spreadsheets alone. In his time at Qube, Tyler has helped hundreds of clients evaluate and understand how Qube can make their finance teams more strategic. So, Tyler, without further ado, please take it away.
Awesome. Thank you for the introduction, Jasmine, and the soothing sounds to start today's webinar. I'm gonna switch to the next slide because looking at myself feels a little awkward. But great to see you all here today.
As Jasmine mentioned, we'll be trying to address all the questions we have in the chat towards the end of the webinar here today. I generally like to do it back and forth, but it's a little easier from management standpoint on our end. Overall, I'm excited to be presenting. I encourage those comments and questions.
I'll be trying to address all of those towards the latter half of today's webinar.
As you mentioned, I'm a solution architect here at CUBE, excited to walk you through how CUBE can help you facilitate your planning process for the next upcoming fiscal year. So we're talking twenty twenty six planning, how we can start to do some of that upfront work in these months prior to the end of the year. So overall agenda for today, we'll be talking about preceding that initial budget. How can Qube help you give an initial baseline for your team to work with? We'll talk about how saving down and managing scenarios within the Qube workspace can help facilitate that. We'll then move on to into creating templates and distributing those to other team members in a variety of different methods. At the end, we'll talk about how we can track variances across different plan versions, and of course, cover that Q and A towards the end here.
So without further ado, let's try to get moving. I'll have to have some slides as we flash throughout. I'll hop back and forth. I'll try to spend the majority of today in queue in spreadsheets showing how the platform actually works.
So let's talk about first seeding your initial budget. So there's gonna be a few ways we can start to create an initial baseline for our team to work with. Of course, we can take advantage of modern technology. AI is kind of a buzzword in today's business environment, but it's a real useful strategy that teams can use within Qubed.
So Qubed has a smart forecasting analysis that uses AI to analyze historical trends, allowing you to create a baseline for your team to work off of, or a quick pulse check into what your team spends up prior down the line in the process. So we could take advantage of that technological advancements, allow AI to do some of that heavy lifting for us, or we we can start to take advantage of all the multiple scenarios we have stored from previous planning cycles. Whether that's different rolling forecasts, a combination of our actualized information stored alongside any existing forecast we have in the system prior.
We can start to take a copy of those prior twelve months of actuals. And then in a spreadsheet, we can apply growth rates. We could also just take those numbers, use those as our baseline, and start moving from there.
Of course, we could always start from scratch. Right? We could create a brand new scenario and have members of the finance team and other department leaders add their inputs from the grounds up, giving us that zero based budgeting approach.
I'll talk about how these scenarios are managed, saved down, etcetera, next. But, overarchingly, we're replacing file management that you see without any FP and A solution in place by managing these scenarios in a centralized database, allowing us to make our life easier in the spreadsheet.
How do we save down these scenarios?
So some initial tips is let's give us a clear name to work off of, a budget v zero, a base budget, an initial budget. I used budgeting baseline today in my example.
It allows you, once you create this initial save, to ultimately track progress and changes over time. From there, you can start to highlight who's been slacking a little bit. Right? Who hasn't been making any changes in this new cycle we're releasing? Who do we still need to collect inputs from on the team?
Ultimately, we can help answer what's changed. Right? We want our initial baseline reserved, locked down. We wanna make adjustments to that plan over time, but we wanna be able to compare one version to a previous version, which we'll see throughout the demo.
We're also going to be managing these different scenarios.
So by managing these scenarios, we'll be able to save off scenarios as we approach different phases of these budgeting cycles.
Best practice in our opinion is we're gonna have a working scenario that everyone's using consistently.
And then as we go along, we have different passes. We can save off a snapshot by duplicating that scenario and locking it down. This allows us to keep an active working version that everyone's familiar with that we're updating over time, but it allows us to save off those distinct versions for comparison down the line. This allows for you to track changes, more visibility, and if you ever wanna revert back to a previous version, you're not undoing a bunch of work manually, you can just refetch that prior version, which we'll see in a little bit.
This ultimately makes it easier to answer that question of what's changed and do I need to revert back.
So ultimately, that comes with security, the ability to lock down these different scenarios. We can also use individual level security users within the system to start to limit what they have access to and what they don't. So that was a high level overview of some concepts that I'm gonna start to demonstrate. I'm gonna do that mainly in the cube workspace here, which I'll navigate to now.
Jasmine, just give me a thumbs up that you can see that next tab of the browser. Awesome. Just making sure we're working from the technical side of things. So this is the cube workspace.
Really, the admin view, I like to kinda call it our mission control here. For those who aren't familiar with cube, I'm gonna give a little crash course. Overarchingly, cube acts like a giant pivot table within the cloud, storing all of your data in different intersections of dimensions stored in your model. Dimensions, simply put, how you slice and dice a report or elements you like to plan by. Dimensionality's customized no cube model looks the same across all of our customer base.
Qube pulls information from actualized source systems, so an ERP like NetSuite or Sage, different HRIS systems like ADP, Bamboo, CRM like Salesforce.
Any data source you wanna bring in or super source system agnostic can be loaded in and structured into this dimensional model. From there, we can take advantage of a two way sync directly into any spreadsheet platform that you might wanna work in. Excel on a line, Excel on a Mac, Excel on a PC, or Google Sheets. You can start to interact in a variety of different areas to update the data that's stored within your model.
The main focus of today is updating different scenarios, but we're still using all of those different dimensions to make changes to our budget versions.
These different scenarios, like I mentioned earlier, are replacing file management that you might have existing without any solution in place. I used to do that work myself when I was a freelance data consultant. It's tedious. It's manual.
You end up with budget versions named budget v two twenty twenty six. No. Actually, for real this time, this is the legit copy. Right?
You have long file names.
Excel files become very heavy because you have so much data there, tracking changes over time, that version control becomes really difficult.
That's all replaced by scenario management in QT. These scenarios act as different buckets of data, different intersections within our model that we can push and pull from. This includes something like actuals, which will be locked down coming directly from source systems, things like NetSuite, Salesforce, whatever we're pulling in. This also includes all the different versions of our plans we're gonna wanna store and update.
We can have as many of these plans as we'd like. We can have as many budgets, forecasts, rolling forecasts, what if analysis, best case, worst case, long range plans. There's no limit on the amount of scenarios you can store here within q. And there's a few mechanics we can take advantage of to make our life easier in the spreadsheet.
One of them that I started out with prior is the smart forecasting feature. This is Qube's foray into AI. Ultimate goal here is predictive forecasting. Let's take revenue, expenses, whatever we wanna model out from the past, have Qube spit out a plan for us. It's a really simple mechanic to create. It follows the theme of Quba being intuitive self-service, but still allowing you to have a lot of power and structure in this robust planning platform.
To create something like a smart forecast, I would choose a destination, maybe an existing scenario I have, or creating something brand new just simply by typing it and naming it whatever I might want. From there, I'm choosing what I want Qube to analyze from an account perspective, and I'm choosing a date range I want it to create a plan for. So for this time of year, I might want it to spit out plans for January through December of twenty twenty six.
What's feeding that? It's that's gonna be the source down low here. My source scenario, ultimately for Smart Forecast, generally my actuals, although I could base it off previous plan versions.
I'm just choosing a date range I want Qube to analyze in order to spit out that predictive forecast.
So for me, the more data, the better. Right? So it's maybe January of twenty twenty all the way through August of twenty five, my most latest month of actuals. But you could confine that to a smaller subset of data if you've seen expansive growth. Right? So your prior five years of data may not be as relevant anymore for a prediction.
So that smart forecast is the way I created this baseline budget where we're gonna be talking about here. This baseline budget's my first initial pass. Right? This is the version that I wanna keep secure, I wanna keep locked down. To apply security to plans, it's as simple as coming in here to edit, then I have a few options. One of them being this write protection.
Write protection, when I flip that down to block and save that down, apply security to that individual scenario. Meaning, I and other team members can still view that plan, we just can't make any changes to the data that's stored within it. I'll be showing you in a little bit how we can go and start to actually facilitate inputs into these plans, make changes to any data existing within those.
We start in the intro talking about our best practice is generally having this working budget, keeping that open, and then saving off snapshots down the line. For today's example purposes, I'm gonna flip that. Right? There's options within the queue presenting how we work in different ways.
So for me, I took this baseline budget. Another function I have from a scenario management perspective is the ability to copy scenarios. I did that by hitting that little pencil icon. Now I'm back into edit, and in the top right, I can copy this plan.
This again is intuitive, it's easy, it just prompts me to rename it, save it down. So I saved in that duplicate version as something like a baseline budget v two. This is the scenario I'm going to be updating throughout today's demo to understand how we can compare changes between these two versions down the line.
So there's a lot of ways we can manage these scenarios in the background to make our life easier in a spreadsheet.
Using that two way sync to any spreadsheet platform we wanna work in, I'll be able to easily retrieve planned data or historical actuals, model out changes in a variety of ways, push that back into Qube, allowing me to store those changes over time.
For now, after we've covered that scenario management, we're gonna jump back into some slides here to to talk about creating planning templates. So there's a variety of decisions that need to be made in return in regards to how we're gonna distribute and create these templates. Is this process centralized or is it distributed? Right?
Is it me and one other person working on this finance where we may not need to distribute as much information, but we can still gain a lot of efficiencies? We don't need to pass files back and forth. We can still work independently on different areas we're responsible for. Or is it more decentralized, like the example I'm gonna be showing today?
Do I have different department heads that I need to leverage their company knowledge for to collect any expense information moving forward?
So that's the example I'm gonna be following. I'm gonna have that base budget. I'm gonna show how a variety of different managers could input information from several different areas.
How far out are we planning? Are we concerned with just this upcoming fiscal year? Are we talking a five year projection? Right. We need to understand what time periods are relevant within this planning cycle. For me, we're gonna be talking about just twenty twenty six today.
On the flip side, how much history do we wanna include in our plans? Is our business relatively static, enjoying a a kind of normalized consistent level of growth? Great. Maybe five years of actuals is relevant then for trend analysis.
Have we gone through a massive spike in the last two years? Meaning, years of data prior to that aren't as relevant? Great. We can include only the past year or two when we're looking at historical analysis.
Finally, do we have a process in place that we like, or do we wanna start to rethink that refresh on the information we're using to collect data?
Qube is very flexible. We're not gonna force you into a specific way of working. You don't have to use templates provided by Qube, even though we have that as an option. You can use Qube to layer on your existing processes, or you can use Qube to build up something from scratch. We'll show a little flavors of both throughout today.
Next, how can my team members start to collaborate? Right? How are we gonna distribute this information to different areas of my organization?
We have workflows within Qube, of course.
Sticking with that theme of being intuitive, but providing enough robust capability to provide structure along that process. That's gonna include the ability to provide an overarching workflow and assign tasks to individual users within that cycle we created.
Alternatively, we can store information within q. We have a q library. If you need a new trusted centralized repository for different reports or different plan versions you want people to access, Kybe, of course, has a place you can store information like that. But we're source system agnostic, we're platform agnostic.
Right? You could keep these in a SharePoint, a G drive, in Box. You could share information through Teams or Slack or a course of traditional email. Qube is going to remain layered onto any spreadsheet files we're using, whether that's for reporting or for planning.
I, probably like most of you, don't love slides, so we're gonna go back into some demo concepts here. Where let's talk about that workflow structure a little bit, then we'll move into some different examples of how we can start to view this data we've been talking about from a structure perspective.
So workflows within q, we're gonna go into a more in-depth breakdown of how this works in the planning cycle two, the next webinar you should attend. But for now, we have a workflow created here for this f y twenty six budget cycle. When I click into that workflow, I can see different tasks I've assigned to different users. In my case, this Tyler guy is running a lot of the show.
In this case, I can, within tasks, provide instructions and a file or a web facing view for people to go and access, collect inputs from there.
For my purposes, I'm gonna use those scenarios we set up, the scenario I fed via a smart forecast, and that alternative copy that I'm going to be updating. Let's go view those in a variety of different platforms.
I'm gonna start in a fan favorite. I'm gonna start within Excel.
Qube is an add on here to Excel, but it manifests as this sidebar on the right. This sidebar is what connects us into that cloud database behind the scenes, where we're integrating the source systems, we're managing all your information, sorting that into that variety of dimensions we just covered.
To exemplify how Qube works from a base level, I'm gonna build up an ad hoc report, and then we'll move into some more polished examples.
Qube is very flexible. Right? It can allow you to layer onto existing templates, or I can always have the ability to create something from scratch. It's It's a very intuitive exercise.
When I hit new here, it becomes a very drag and drop pivot table like experience. I'm dragging and dropping those different dimensions to have Q build up a framework and populate that information with data for me without the use of any coding.
To do that, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag some of these accounts, and within my accounts, I have several statements and operational metrics. Again, a variety of source systems can feed this model. For now though, I'm just gonna grab my income statement. The time periods I'm concerned with are the upcoming year.
I have different selection types, so I can include roll ups like quarters and years, or I could do the lowest level only or just the months of twenty twenty six. I can choose what scenario I wanna analyze as well. I could pull in my actuals for twenty twenty six though. We don't have any actualized data, of course.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna access that baseline budget that I locked down on the web portal. It has security applied, but that doesn't mean I can't still view the plan. I can't. So when I hit fetch data here, Kube is pinging that cloud database, building out structure in a spreadsheet, and populating all these intersections of data directly in the spreadsheet without the use of any coding.
So everything here pulls in at the intersection of different dimensions. This data point then will be my revenue roll up for my baseline budget in February of twenty six, brought in without the use of any syntax, coding, etc.
The beauty of Qube, once it's into a spreadsheet, all that formatting that you're used to is spreadsheet native. So you and your team can continue to leverage all that muscle memory you've built up over the years to clean up this report or plan however you see fit. I could add in some structural changes to those headers. I could add any sort of color or highlighting I want to any roll up. Q will honor any changes I make from a formatting perspective. So if I fat finger something, I delete out data, someone breaks a formula I have somewhere, I'm not panicking like I would be in spreadsheets alone. I can always refetch that information, repaying the database, and q will maintain all that formatting I just put into place.
So initial exercise we just showed was I use that smart forecasting feature web portal to build up a baseline budget. I retrieve the values q created for me directly into a spreadsheet simply by using an ad hoc pivot table like experience, dropping that structure and data directly into the spreadsheet, and I can format from there.
Alternatively, we can have existing formats templates that we use to view information or collect inputs.
I'm gonna show that in a variety of ways. For now, let's move to a more polished version of an input template.
For me, I wanna hit fetch. Qube pings the database, brings back all this intersections of data I'm requesting. In this case, several accounts for this for baseline budget, filtered for all my departments in this case.
With Qube, I have the ability to get more granular. I could start to pivot down into a specific department like sales. I could hit fetch, retrieve those changes directly into the sheet. I could also bounce over to a different scenario. These scenarios are changing the intersection Qube is reading in the spreadsheet to access a new version of a plan. I'm not copying and saving down a new file. I'm not having to email my finance head to retrieve that latest information.
Assuming I have the correct security, I can hit fetch and retrieve that information no matter where I'm working.
So this is gonna be my finance manager view. I'm viewing the information for my sales department specifically.
People are gonna make updates to these plans in a variety of ways. I can assign them where to work in that workflow section, and it can point them to different directions within Qube by how they can interact with it. I'm gonna start first by something that's newer with Qube. We can collect inputs directly from the web.
So within this web structure, Qube is very unique, in that you can build up a report or an input template in a spreadsheet where you're comfortable working. From there, you can copy over everything into a more structured web facing view for other people in your organization to go access. You can copy over all the formats, the structures, any excel native formulas you have. It's very unique to Qt. Other solutions, of course, have the ability to create a web facing view, but yet to do it in their language, their templates, their preferred colors and structures.
Qube maintains that flexibility of the spreadsheet that finance users love, but allows other, maybe less spreadsheet savvy folks in the organization to come and make inputs in a familiar feel, but in this web facing view. So I'm transitioning roles here. I'm no longer the finance manager. I'm the head of sales.
I'm logging into Qube. I'm accessing this report. It automatically fetched in for me that baseline budget b two I should work in, information specific to my department. Now I have the ability to go and make inputs, make changes into this process.
We'll start by saying, like, alright. I know I'm sending some of my reps to some conferences a few months out of the year. That's not reflected in our plan yet. So what I'll do is I'll start to enter those numbers. I know on average, it costs about ten thousand dollars to send a rep or two to a conference. We're going to one in February and April and in June.
What I'm going to do to add this information to my plan. Everything I've been doing thus far has been fetching, excuse me, fetching data, pulling information from the cloud down into a spreadsheet or into a web facing view.
Publish inverses that mechanic. It takes values from the web or from a spreadsheet, pushes them back to the cube database for storage. So what happens when I publish here is everything is interconnected through cube. I, as a sales manager, could be working in New York in a web facing view or in a Google Sheet, Push out my changes.
My head of finance living in San Francisco could collect all those inputs seamlessly through that fetch mechanic, all rolled up into a file on their desktop, locally sourced. Right? It's all interconnected through fee cube now. We're not dealing with file management.
We're dealing with scenario management.
To prove that up, now that that's been published into the system, I could go directly back to my Excel version.
I could come in here and hit fetch to see if there's been any changes that have been made throughout this budgeting cycle. We can immediately see that ten thousand dollars pull through.
Now as the head of finance, I still have the ability to contribute to this process.
So I can add more changes and plans directly from the spreadsheet where I'm used to working.
In this case, I know my head of sales didn't really think about the idea that we can't show up to a conference empty handed. Right? We're gonna need some promotional items to go along with it, whether that's some cookies, maybe a nice ballpoint pen, whatever company swag we wanna give out at these events. So I'm gonna use my Excel knowledge.
I'm gonna say, hey. I wanna take this information times that by point two. Twenty percent of that spend is going to be associated with each conference we're going to. I'm gonna add in these additional cost to my plan for this department using an Excel data formula.
No new language, no new syntax. I'm not learning SQL or coding on the back end to make updates to that same familiar environment I'm used to working in. From here, I have that ability to publish out the exact same way that we saw from that web facing view. I can even type in a memo for something like new promotional, assumption, and I can publish out that data.
Once again, Qube is reading the changes I'm making to this template on the sheet. It's pushing out all of that information into that cloud database, meaning I can access those changes anywhere I'm working.
That could be in a spreadsheet. It could be it could be in a web facing report view. So if I come back in here and fetch, I'm the sales manager again. I'd wanna see if my changes have been reflected. When I hit fetch, I could understand that the finance manager added that two thousand dollars for promotional items right alongside those months that I added conference spend in as well.
Quick coffee break while that loads in. After this, what I'll jump to next is an example of maybe I'm in a different department.
Apparently, I'm gonna have to wait because my Internet connection is a little funky today, apparently.
But what we're able to do is see that information pull through that two grand I pushed in.
From there, what I'm gonna have next is maybe I also have someone else in my organization, so a marketing head. They don't like the web based interview. They love Google Sheets. Great.
People do not need to sacrifice where they're used to working in order to make changes to a plan. So for marketing, I have that same ability to fetch information in, and we'll say the marketing head is gonna add some perspective expenses as well. Marketing head is gonna buy some new software, wink, wink. So we'll say that's gonna be about three thousand dollars a month, and that software charge is gonna carry out throughout the end of the year.
I still have that ability to come in here and hit publish.
What's gonna happen here is that Qube is gonna analyze all these changes I'm making to this different versions, allow me to push out that information into my consolidated rolled up plan. The reason I'm pushing out changes from different departments is to show that based on either user security or differences in the templates we're distributing to people, we can work simultaneously on these budget versions. We no longer need to pass a specific version back and forth, wondering who has the latest version, what it's named, etcetera.
We can all work at once in a variety of different platforms, pushing that into the kubeplow database.
So let's talk about some different ways we can start to roll up this information.
We wanna build summary and comparison views. We wanna be able to track changes in real time, flag any noteworthy changes, and drive some what if analysis as we're making different adjustments to different snapshots.
These change tracking can be granular or it can be summarized. I could see it for individual departments or all my departments rolled up into one.
In that case, let's say I came back into this department variances tab.
I have that sort of view set up. I have my baseline budget, my lockdown version, the scenario I cannot make any edits to, and that baseline budget b two. When I hit fetch, I can retrieve all the changes I and other people are making across all these different platforms.
We can see those variances pulled through for sales around conferences and promotional items. We can see those changes we've been making to marketing for that new software we're going to acquire. We can view this granular, split out by department, or maybe I could flip that. I could see it for all departments, but I could see it broken out by individual line items here. So we'll see those variances pull through for in each specific account I was adjusting.
I used formulas along the way. Of course, there's a lot more nuance that can be built in this planning process. You can have driver, multi base step multi step calculations that are feeding these plans. We could plan from a line item level.
We could use formulas in the back end of Qube as well. Qube is very flexible. We try to give you the option of how you wanna work because we wanna keep you in charge. We're not a consulting based software.
Everyone you work with is an Qube employee in house. We wanna empower you to use Qube the best of your ability. Right? We don't want you to be relying on other people to help make changes to your different model versions.
Overarchingly, a few other things I wanna call out. Everything I've been adjusting and changing is to one scenario. So when I come back to my baseline budget up top here and I hit fetch, all these changes I was making, whether that's sales or marketing, are going to revert. I still have that baseline copy.
So if marketing gets a little spend happy and they don't need that software yet, great. I still have this previous iteration of the budget I can go and reference that doesn't include those new changes. There's security applied to these plans. So if I was accidentally working on the wrong budget, where I was trying to say change something in the past, and I wanted to spend a hundred thousand dollars on some promotional items, when I go and try to publish here, Qube's not gonna let me, there's gonna be no data changed, that scenario has security applied in the web portal, we can still view the plan, we just can't make any edits to the data that's stored within it.
So if I refetch, it would pull in the latest version, which does not include that hundred thousand dollars.
Furthermore, every change I or other people are tracking in the system is logged here in this audit trail, this audit trail keeps track of all the adjustments anyone's been making, so we can see where I made changes.
In this case, this was published in via the web. It stored all the dimensions and the values I was updating. The next change I made, including a memo, was adding two thousand dollars to one of those promotional items That was tracking me to the file I was working on my in my desktop.
Lastly, I also made a change from Google Sheets. This, again, gives me when I made the change, who made them. I'm Qube Staff. I work for Qube. Free all to be your name or your email. In this case, it still shows everything I was adjusting, but it links me to that g sheet I was working on instead.
So we've covered a lot today. How to use scenarios to the best of our ability to manage different versions and use Qube to help spit out a baseline version, whether through a smart forecast or that easy ad hoc retrieval of existing plan information or prior prior historicals to feed my plan. We then moved into how we can manage changes, either through workflows or any processes we have built out existing today through Slack, through Gmail.
From there, people can submit their changes in a variety of different methods.
If you're traditional finance and you like a spreadsheet, great, continue to use that, you can use Excel or Google Sheets. If someone isn't as spreadsheet savvy, they they just wanna log on, see their numbers, maybe make some adjustments, point them to that web facing view. It doesn't matter where people are working. It's all interconnected through these easy to manage scenarios that we can apply security to and track all those changes along the way in that audit trail.
That was the majority of what I have prepared today. Jasmine, I think we might be time for some q and a and understand what people have questions are and see where that takes us.
Absolutely. Let's get started with that. I see a bunch of them in the chat, so thank you so much everyone for submitting those. Continue to submit those questions as they come up, but let's get started, Tyler.
Our first question is, is it possible to exclude outliers from smart forecasts? For example, projects that were extraordinarily high or low from a revenue perspective.
You could always exclude let's let's say projects were a dimension within your cube. You could choose what dimensions you include so you could toggle on and off for, like, a certain series of accounts that was assigned to that project, etcetera.
This anomaly sort of detection is also coming from an AI perspective that's next up on our road map.
Awesome.
Our next question is, can Qube give a summary on why it's creating a budget for a particular accounts based on historical audits?
For example, looking at historical repairs, it looks like vendor x spends y per year, etcetera.
Otherwise, almost as important as the how much.
Absolutely. That's a great question. That's something we've heard a lot. Other API capabilities we have in the system, including a natural language natural language processing chatbot available in Slack or Teams, provides that sort of qualitative context around how it arrived at an answer, the filters it used to arrive.
We're going to translate some of that detailed information into our smart forecast coming up. So smart forecast is our first iteration into AI. We're constantly working on improving on it. Providing the why behind these numbers is near the top of the list, so that's coming soon.
Some. Alright. Our next question, publish keeps adding or just updating the changes. For example, just keep adding the ten thousand in or overrides. Excuse me.
If you're working on the exact same dimensional intersection, so the same account, same department, same scenario, same time period, it will overwrite that change. Qube will take the most recent publish into that specific intersection of dimensions.
However, you can build up. So let's say I wanted several iterations of that ten thousand dollar line item amount rolled up into one month, we have that option as well. So classic kind of answer I don't like to give, but it depends.
Overarchingly, though, I would say overwrite would be a more direct answer to Liz's question.
To remove an amount, can you delete it, or do you need to change it to zero?
You can delete it or change it to zero. You change it to zero, it'll be stored as zero. If you delete it, it's just a blank in the system.
Now we had some questions on the sales budget report. People were wondering what how the data was brought in.
Yeah. So it fetches in automatically for you. The way you connect a report let me pull up an example there.
So, give me a second to find that here.
I'll show you Tyler's finding that out, everybody.
Just a reminder that this webinar will be sent out to everyone. The recording will and the slides will as well. I know we've had a few people ask that in the chat, so no worries. If you popped on a few minutes late, we'll send you the recording. You'll have all the info.
Yeah. So the way information was brought in the cube is through that fetching mechanic, whether I click that manually spreadsheet or I have that fetched for me in the web facing view. The way to connect an existing template into cube is you're highlighting an area that you want Qube to analyze, in this case, the range I have prepared around the data that's in this sheet, which I have some information hidden for formatting purposes.
So I'm going to go include that information here.
A little rough here since this is on the fly. Let's select that range. I'll rehide this information for visibility purposes.
So this is the report we were viewing prior. In order to get this formatted into a web facing view, I'm, again, I'm highlighting not time not this time the range of data cubes analyzing, but the overarching structure I want included in that report view. From there, if I wanna publish this into a web report view, I'm just hitting a new report. I'm selecting this report area. Qube will allow me to save that into that web facing view, which results in that view we saw prior. You can see that's copied over. It automatically fetches information into the sheet when I first open that view, or if any changes have been made after the fact, I can always refetch and to ensure that I'm seeing the most latest version.
So, again, that was that point that cube is very unique and that I can build that report or that input template in a spreadsheet where I'm used to working, copy over everything directly into that web based view.
Thanks, Tyler. Another question. Can you filter audit trail by dimensions?
In this case, someone wants to see the trail for one particular account or scenario.
That is a great question. You can filter by team members or by event type. I don't know at the moment if you can filter for a particular intersection like a counter scenario, but we can check on that and try to let you know.
For sure. In regards to dimensions again, when publishing, does each dimension need to be at the lowest level?
Yes. Information is stored at the lowest level within Qube.
That's not Qube specific. That's an OLAP database functionality. That's the gold standard in terms of how information is stored across FP and A systems in general. If a system does not have an OLAP database, I would be concerned.
For a cube, yes, information needs to live at the lowest level to be published. If you wanna plan in a more summary level view, so instead of for each revenue account, you wanna plan for revenue at large. There's a lot of ways you could accomplish that, though.
Cool. Closing our dimension questions. When publishing, can you have a dimension in the filter?
Yes. Again, every dimension needs to be accounted for when you're publishing into cube. That can be accommodated by having it on the sheet specifically or by having that dimension filtered on.
Perfect. Switching gears a little bit here, we have a question. Is it possible to show how the headcount planning function can be used to build people expenses into the annual planning process?
I don't think we have the time for that here today, but we're happy to set that as an agenda item for the next iteration of our planning process, these webinars we're doing.
Stay tuned for part two, everyone. Back. Wonderful. Gotcha. We're back. For sure. When someone makes a change and can add a note as to why they made the change, can that be made into a required field?
I don't know if we can make the memo field required, but I can check on that as well, and we can let you know, Candace.
Okay. Honestly, great question. Great question. Okay. Friends, keep putting in your questions in the chat here.
We just have a couple more as we're closing out. Can multiple people make inputs to a budget at the same time? If so, how does Q handle version control in that case?
Absolutely. Again, it's no longer version control. It's scenario management. People can work in different areas of that budget in this case and push all those changes into one centralized scenario. So that can be two people working on the exact same Excel file. If you want an Excel, one in Google Sheets, one in the web like I showed today.
Perfect. We've had a few questions on our budget templates. Does Qube offer any prebuilt templates that we can use for annual planning?
Absolutely. We have an extensive, template library for both traditional reports you're gonna run or any planning ideas from a template perspective as well. So yes. Yes. Of course.
Okay. Wonderful. And, also, lastly, how does Qube handle driver based planning?
Yeah. Qube can handle driver based planning in a variety of methods.
Again, we're trying to be flexible in our approach. You can use back end form use within Qube, publish and inputs those specific drivers, have them stored within our model, and have calculations down the line affect those. Or for more nuanced and very complex calculations, right, we can take advantage of the spreadsheet. That's what Excel and Google Sheets are good at.
Right? Excel is not meant to be a giant store of data, have information flowing in and out all the time, but it is very good at the analysis piece. It provides us flexibility in how things are calculated, visibility into how those calculations were performed, and the ability to make one off changes as we see fit. So that approach of leaving some of the logic in the spreadsheet, having cube layer on and absorb the outputs, prevents that situation you'll run into with other solutions where all that logic and coding that needs to be stored somewhere.
Other solutions that's in a black box behind the scenes, very hard to update, makes it very rigid, makes you reliant on third parties to help you make those updates.
With Qube, you can preserve some of that flexibility and maintain some of those calculations in a spreadsheet as you see fit.
Thanks so much, Tyler. As we're coming up on time here, everyone, I just wanted to remind folks that, again, we've got that part two webinar coming up on September tenth. Everyone that registered is going to receive a link to sign up for that. Again, even if you can't make it, register.
We'll send you the recording and the slides. Don't worry. We also have a guide to planning in Qube that you'll have access to and a link to subscribe to our newsletter called the finance fix where we provide, weekly highlights, from things going on in the FP and A space that's relevant to your roles. We also have our help center.
So in case, you don't have any one on one time with your cube user, with the team, or perhaps, you know, you're interested in becoming a cube user, but you wanna kind of explore what we're all about in your own time, visit our help center. You'll receive a link to that as well, to check out which we're all about. Yeah. And with that yeah.
That's fine.
Final note a final note.
Today's a high level crash course. Right? There's a lot more nuance that goes into something as robust as cube. If you ever wanna see something a little more tailored, a little more personalized, reach out, and we'll get a customized demo set up for you. But hopefully, y'all enjoyed the overarching webinar today. I'm looking forward to part two coming up.
Thanks, everyone. Enjoy.
Cheers, y'all.
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