Video Transcription
Thank you so much for joining, and welcome to annual planning part two. Planning is a team sport, where we're gonna show you how to budget with, focus flexibility, and just get you started for budget season.
If you're joining us from, part one, welcome back for part two. And if you're just joining us now fresh faced and ready to learn all things, annual budgeting with Qube, we're so happy you're here. Just a couple of housekeeping items, before we dive right in. This is a live q and a.
At the end of this webinar, we'll have one. And so we usually spend about thirty minutes going over the presentation and then about another fifteen minutes or so just, on live questions. So please, please use the Q and A function on this webinar to ask away, and we'll get right to those questions at the end of the presentation.
Other housekeeping items, we have a part three coming soon. So absolutely check your inbox and stay tuned for that, because you won't wanna miss when we when we host that.
And lastly, this webinar is being recorded, and everyone who registered will be getting a copy of both the recording and this slide deck so you won't miss a thing. We'll also have some additional resources to share after today's webinar as well. So let's get right into it. You wanna hop to the next slide, Liban?
Great. Okay. Today's session will be led by Liban. He's a solution architect here at Qube.
Lee Van has years of experience in FP and A, starting his career as a consultant for profits. He was responsible for end to end implementation, including design, data integrations, and day to day execution for several projects that he himself led. Liban has helped hundreds of clients evaluate and understand how Qube can make their finance teams more strategic. So without further ado, Liban, please take it away.
Thanks a lot, Jasmine. So to start, we're just gonna go through a brief agenda. We are gonna go through building workflows. Now I know this is a pretty new tool in Qube. Maybe you've had a chance to play around with it, but budget season is approaching, and we wanna make sure that you're comfortable using the workflow function. So to start the demo, we're gonna go over what to consider before creating a workflow and how to actually set one up. And then we're gonna go through adding team members into Qube as well as being able to track the progress of all of their tasks.
Now towards the end of the demo, we're gonna go through a q and a. So please use that function as Jasmine mentioned and ask away. But to start off this demo here, We wanna go through some of the challenges when it comes to annual planning. Lack of team alignment. Not everybody is in the same scenario.
A lot of different departments, it's difficult to consolidate data. Right? So this is something Cube helps with.
Making sure everybody's on the same page in regards to the latest source of truth. Right? Making sure all of our actuals are updated and everybody is working in alignment. There's a ton of different challenges, and Cube helps in a lot of different ways. And where Cube helps specifically is our workflow engine. So whether you take a distributed approach or a more centralized approach to planning, you can make use of this tool.
And I'll go through both avenues on this demo here today.
It's gonna allow you to collaborate with a lot of your team members outside of finance as well as within your own finance team. It has a comment history as well as an audit log to keep track of every change that has been made. And then to wrap up the demo, I'm gonna go through a couple of our neat AI tools as well that'll help you with the reporting side of things.
Now our mission is to turn annual planning from a fragmented from a fragmented process into a true team sport, which it is. But as you guys know, some sports are individuals. So if your FP and A team handles the bulk of the planning process in your organization, we will cover how to use the workflow engine to help your internal team if you guys are, you know, anywhere between two to three people.
But there's a couple of things to consider before you even start. Right? First, it's important to under it's important to understand whether you take a centralized approach to planning or a distributed approach.
Next, it's important to understand how far out you guys are gonna be planning, how much history you need to include in your planning templates, and then the, you know, the golden question. Right? Are we gonna be planning in the spreadsheet, or are we gonna allow our end users to plan on the web?
Now, there's a lot of different distribution methods. Of of course, Qube has the workflow engine. As you guys know, Qube has the library. This is almost like a shared drive in the platform itself.
Of course, you guys can use some sort of shared drive, whether it's in Google or in Microsoft.
And, finally, the classic, right, emailing templates amongst each other. Hopefully, with the first three options that we provide, this is no longer going to be the case.
But let's actually start with how I like to think about planning cycles.
So in the Q platform, the first thing you wanna consider is, well, do I need input from end users? So the, you know, very first thing you gotta do is you gotta go into the user management portal, and you have to assign your users a user type as well as their data access group. Now I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with this new user management portal. I know we've rolled it out about a month and a half ago to two months ago, but it allows you to very granularly assign which features of Qube each end user has access to, as well as what intersection of data that those end users have access to.
But once you set up the user management tool, you're gonna jump into the dimensions tab, and you're going to create a new scenario. Right? Whether this is for your plan for next year, f y twenty six, whether this is to close your q four reforecast, you're gonna wanna create a scenario where your end users have a starting point regarding, you know, this planning cycle. And there's a lot of different tools you can use to kinda create this new scenario.
Of course, the smart forecast tool, you can duplicate any previous budget or forecast. But for myself, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take what we've originally planned for the beginning of this fiscal year, and I'm simply gonna duplicate it, and I'm going to create a live working budget scenario. And once I click save, I can attach this working budget scenario to every single data entry template, every single output report that I have, so everybody's aligned working in one scenario.
Now when it gets to understanding where your users are going to plan, you guys have to make a crucial decision. Right? Do you want them to plan on the web, or do you want them to plan in the spreadsheet?
Or both. Right? But once you understand, well, maybe I want my end users to actually plan on the web, it's extremely easy pushing templates and reports from the spreadsheet to the web using this new web web report tool in the, cube sidebar.
So you create your reporting package in the spreadsheet. You can go to any output report. Let's take a look at this one here, where I'm able to track my original budget to this new working budget across all of my accounts. And all I'm gonna do is simply highlight the entire range of the web report, Go down to the publish web report button.
Call out said report name. Select the entire report area. Notice how I highlighted not only the intersections in which the data resides, but I'm also highlighting, you know, the formatting itself of the entire report.
I can adjust the security for said report, and then I can publish this web report directly to the Q platform.
Now where I can access these web reports? Really simple. In the report function, I can click into this new OPEX BVA report that I pushed up, and what you're gonna notice is it looks the exact same as it did in the spreadsheet.
And this works with data entry templates as well. Right? So let's say I have a forecast input template that looks something like this. And for my end users, they're not responsible for the headcount plan in this example. Right? My FP and A team or my people team handles that. Now what you're gonna notice is I have the ability to again highlight the entire range of this data entry template and publish it up to the web, and my end users can see these data entry templates in the report function.
If they click into the data entry template, it's gonna open up, and what you're gonna notice is it's going to look and feel the exact same as it does in the spreadsheet.
Now it's important to understand why we go through creating data entry templates on the web. Now, of course, our end users can, you know, go into the spreadsheet and conduct data entry and push and pull accordingly as you guys have already probably done.
But our workflow management tool, once you guys actually create workflow activities and create workflow tasks, you can attach those data entry templates as well as those output reports to each individual task for your end users. So that brings us to the workflow tool itself.
There's two layers when it comes to workflow management. There's creating workflow activities. So that's the first step. In this case, let's say we're trying to conduct an h two reforcast.
Right? I'm gonna click into this new this, workflow activity that I created. And then within each activity, you can have as many tasks as you want. So in my example here, I'm gonna go ahead and create a workflow task under this six plus six reforecast activity, and the first task will be to review spend against plan.
I can assign my end user. And at this point, as you guys add users into the system, their security is already set. Right? You've already adjusted their data access. You've already adjusted their user type. But once you assign said end user, you can attach a due date for the task. You can add some instructions.
And then the holy grail here, three different attachments. Right? So the first attachment is the web report. Whether it's an output report like the BVA that we're looking at or the data entry template itself, you can attach that. You can attach dashboards if your team wants a visual representation of what their outputs look like against spend.
And then, you know, most importantly, if your end users want supporting templates, if they want to, you know, flat out just plan using an Excel facing report, you'd simply save your Excel workbook, upload it into the cube library, and then you can access and attach your web your Excel report, excuse me, or GSheets report, into the workflow task.
Now what you're gonna notice here is I've created three workflow tasks for the head of my marketing spend. Right? The first is for them to review their OpEx forecast.
And from their view, if I just open up my second window here, I'm just in an incognito window, you're gonna notice my marketing manager, they don't have a lot of access to Qube, but what they do have is access to their workflow tasks. And I can see task by task, whether it's a web report or if it's a data entry template. And the first task that I'm gonna open up here is reviewing their OpEx forecast. Now what you're gonna notice is that this data automatically intersects with what level of granularity you give them access to.
So because I'm in charge of marketing spend, the filtering here automatically filters to the marketing department. So I get to see what I've originally planned account by account and then this new iteration of the plan that I'm looking to make changes to. If I go to the next the next task here, it is that data entry template. And this is the beauty of kinda pushing everything into the web from the spreadsheet.
Right? Your end users can just flip through each task. They can enter in their outputs from this view, jump back to their OPEX forecast at a more aggregated level, and see what the outputs look like. Right?
It's a centralized place for them to conduct data entry.
Now the last task that I have here, I've also provided them with a supporting template for any vendor level planning that they're wishing to conduct. So they can download the Excel extension, open up their data entry template, and view the itemized schedule that I attached accordingly.
Now let's actually go through what it takes to start planning on the web. Right? Super simple. The look and feel is the exact same as the spreadsheet itself.
So first and foremost, when they click into the actual task itself, the data will automatically refresh to give them, you know, the outputs of, in this case, six months of actuals and then six months of what they've originally planned. Now let's say they're looking to make adjustments to their plan. Let's go into this software line, for example. They can type in how much they're looking to adjust there.
Of course, they didn't originally plan for this new video editing software in this example. But what you're gonna notice is they have the ability to publish data directly from the web. Right? So here, I can publish.
It's gonna send that five thousand dollars at a super, you know, granular level up to the web, and Qube takes care of everything consolidations related. Right? So I just made an entry to October of twenty twenty five, impacting the working budget scenario under the software expense line. Now if I go to my OPEX forecast output template, you're gonna see the difference between my original budget and my working budget is that five thousand dollar expense that I just added.
Now they're tasked with pretty much entering whatever they need to enter. Right? So let's say in this next example, we're looking to hire two interns, and, you know, we're looking to move people from a more remote approach to a hybrid approach. So we need to account for rent expense in q four. It's gonna cost, let's say, eight thousand dollars a month.
Spread that across time, and your end users are able to publish at this granular level. Now what you're gonna notice is we have a comment function. So once they're done with said task, let's say those were the only two adjustments they needed to make, they can very easily flip the task from a to do to a done. Right?
And using the comment box, you can see I've made a comment. Hey. If there's any questions about the template, please use this chat to communicate. I can communicate to the approver of said task.
Hey there.
I just finalized the inputs.
Let me know if I missed anything.
I can send that over to them. And what you're gonna notice is from my view, I get an email that lets me know that they just changed that task from a to do to done, but I ultimately have the option and the ability as an admin to either reject or grant that the data publish. So let's say I'm looking and I'm reviewing, you know, their entry their entries accordingly.
And let's say they forgot about, you know, some office supplies that they brought up through email. I can very easily go into the comment history, let them know, Send it back to them.
Flip the task from a done to a to do.
And from their POV as a data entry user, when they go back to their workflow tasks, you're gonna notice that task went from a done to oh, let's just go back here. Let's flip that back to a to do.
It's gonna trigger an email to them.
And then when they click into the email and refresh queue, that task is now back to a to do. Right? So it's a robust system where you're able to kinda keep track of things that are either done or things that still need to be done. Right? And what they can do is they can go in, read your comments that you left them. It looks like in this case, they forgot to enter in the office supplies line.
And when it comes to vendor level planning, that's where that supporting template comes into play. Right? So obviously, from this view, it's just planning at the GL level. But of course, if you provide them with additional supporting templates, they can download this Excel file. They can go into their itemized schedule. And let's say their itemized schedule looks something like this where they're still able to plan a GL account. In this case, let's say they're looking to plan office supplies.
They can type out some notes.
Maybe they to Staples and then type out an entry date.
And then from the slightly more granular view, they could plan need to plan public from this supplies where I used Excel supporting templates to plan, I get to see the output of that nine hundred and ninety nine dollar expense.
Now for myself as an end user, if I'm looking at the output of what they adjusted, what I'm able to view, because they plan at a slightly more granular level for office supplies rather than software, is I can actually highlight this cell, drill down into it, and get the underlying view. So I get to see the line item schedule, the entry date that this person typed in, the notes that they, you know, ended up typing in, as well as the vendor that the expense was attributed to. But once that's all finalized from their POV, they can flip set task from a to do to done. They can jump into the next task, which is just overviewing all of the changes that they made on the web, and, again, flip that to a to do to a done.
And one by one, they're able to flip all of their tasks and kinda trigger an email over to you, the admin, that their tasks are all complete.
Now you can do that from that slightly more, you know, granular view, or you can do it from this view here. But once I trigger these tasks from a to do to a done, I'm able to then send my admin an email, letting them know that, hey. All of this is complete.
Now earlier in the demo, I promised to let you guys know, you know, see, a different view and a different way of using the workflow function. Right? Workflows works really well when you guys are collaborating with end users. But, of course, this is not always the case for every single FP and A team.
So what you guys can do as well is you can create workflow tasks and workflow activities. If I go to this screen here, And you guys can almost use this tool as a checklist. Right? What if you're responsible for the headcount plan for every single department?
Right? What if you're responsible for the actual data entry for not only expenses, but for revenue for, you know, the revenue lines for your different business units? You can create workflow activities as well as workflow tasks to let you keep track and keep progress of what's done and what's, excuse me, not done. Right?
And you can communicate with your team, you know, exactly where you are in regards to the progress there.
Now, ultimately, with those changes that they made, they're done with their expense level planning. But remember, I'm still responsible for the headcount plan. Right? So I can go into, you know, my headcount planning model where I make an adjustment to, and I add, you know, two seats in the marketing department here.
And from this slightly more granular view as a part of my headcount plan, I'm able to push the data from the spreadsheet all the way up to the cloud. And what you're gonna notice is I'm making an adjustment to the working budget scenario. That's where all the data gets aggregated to. So for me, as an admin, if I'm looking at an output report across the marketing department, I get to see high level what the variances are according to what my end users typed in for office supplies, software, as well as rent expense.
But I also get to see the impact of hiring two interns in this department that start in q four as well. Now this level of detail, of course, is very sensitive. So depending on who's looking at it, are you actually able to drill down into that data? And that's where the user management portal comes into play.
Right? You don't want your end users being able to go into that web report that you created and see the FTEs and, you know, the salaries, start dates, end dates, etcetera for your end users. So it's important to make sure that the security is set up accordingly. But for yourself, you can either view those output reports directly in the spreadsheet or view them on the web.
And you can see here, there's a variance of two seats between my original budget and my working budget that nets to that forty k variance.
Any questions?
I know we went through quite a bit.
A ton in the chat, Lee Van. Absolutely. Have we concluded the end of this webinar section?
Yes.
The We have more.
Yeah. The workflow.
Yeah. The workflow's all complete. I was gonna wrap it to the AI analyst piece. I'm sure you guys have kinda seen this tool at a high level. Highly encourage you guys to actually take a chance to use the tool. You can download the Teams or the Slack extensions.
But if you actually just wanna use the tool on the web, then you're more than welcome to do so. And remember that it respects the security and permissions applied to each user. So if I prompt, you know, what is the variance between let's say for twenty twenty five, operating expenses or budgets versus working budget. I can ask in plain English any questions pertaining to my data, and what it's able to do is populate an answer in plain English as well. Now you guys know we are Excel and GSheets facing, so you can also use this as a report building tool where you ask it to create CSV files for you. And from there, you can download those files, open the cube extension, have cube sit as an overlay on top of your templates, and from there, use, you know, the drill down functionality, the fetch and publish functionality accordingly.
But highly would encourage you guys to use a tool like this to kinda garner to kinda understand really, at a high level what the variances are between two scenarios that you're working on.
Any questions?
We do have a bunch of questions. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen just to go over a couple resources, and then we'll dive right into that q and a. So thank you so much, Leben.
Sure. Okay.
So incredible, incredible demonstration. Again, we've got annual planning part three coming soon. If you haven't joined part one or seen part one, or misplaced the email where we sent the recording for that, don't worry. I'll send both part one and two of our annual planning series over email.
Stay tuned for part three. You'll receive an email from our team. Feel free to, read up on our guide to planning in Qube. We have that and many other resources on our website.
We also encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter, The Finance Fix, where we share a lot of amazing insights from leaders in the space. And as always, we have help center available for anybody currently using Qube. We're kind of just curious, what Qube is all about. If you'd like to see if you're not currently using Qube and you'd like to see more on a more personalized demonstration, feel free to reach out to myself, anybody on the team.
You'll see links in our email signatures to book demonstrations for that as well. So let's dive right into our q and a.
Pulling that up here.
Okay. Our first question, apologies if this was covered in part one, but when will Keap's budget templates be updated on the website?
We can definitely get back to you on that. We just made a mass update about two months ago. We've added fifty plus templates, not only on the reporting side of things, but just prepackaged OPEX planning templates, rolling forecast templates, revenue planning templates, depending on your industry and how you guys plan.
Just watch out for an email from your account management team, on when that does get updated, but it should get updated shortly.
Perfect. How do you balance top down target from leadership with bottom up forecasts from business units, especially when they're misaligned?
Great question. So I think of top down versus bottom up as two different scenarios. Right? So with Qube, what you can very easily do is call out your top down your top down targets towards maybe the top of the template, call up the scenario that the outputs are associated with, click fetch, and that provides you with a very easy view of seeing what those targets look like for your end users to start conducting data entry. I would also have a supporting template that weighs the two scenarios against each other from a top down view, where you still have the ability to drill down into your bottom up plan to see the underlying details. But, ultimately, you wanna track the variances, get you know, between your top down versus your bottom up, ultimately.
Okay. How do we add a layer of security where users can complete tasks, make changes, but they're not published until I review or an admin reviews?
That's a really good question, Benjamin. And this is the beauty of having our data not necessarily contingent to the sidebar.
So as you know, with Qube, you can type in numbers to a data entry template and without clicking publish, without even having Qube open. Right? You have the option of saving down that spreadsheet and uploading it into the Qube library or even attaching it to your workflow task. Right?
So if you did want that extra layer of approval, quote, unquote, then I would highly suggest restricting the publish for any scenario that you call out within those data entry templates. Have your end users plan in the spreadsheet, and use the workflow engine almost as a communication layer. Right? Very easily are they able to type out the numbers, send the template to you, type out some comments, and you guys can exchange back and forth, ultimately allowing you to publish the outputs at the end.
For me, personally, what I would do is I would have a live working budget scenario where I do enable my end users to publish, but that isn't the scenario that ultimately gets approved for reporting purposes. In my opinion, this would be the easiest way of going about it. So create a live, you know, working plan where they can constantly make updates to, provide them with a due date. Hey.
This plan is gonna completely lock down as of this date. And upon that date, arriving, you're gonna go through review reviewal processes with them. That data is now on the cloud. Things that you need to tweak, you will either tweak yourself or you can exchange, you know, comments with them for them to tweak the data.
But, ultimately, that is not the scenario that you're gonna be using to present on reports. But once that data is finalized, you can then take a duplication of said scenario, and that's the finalized plan, the one that got approved by finance, essentially.
Awesome. Another question in the chat. How do you limit the area that users have access to? Do Do you have a seminar or maybe documentation to get the files ready to upload a web report?
Great question. Yes. So we have, in the help center, articles as well as videos on both of those items. Right?
Because those are two really important items when it comes to planning and budgeting season in general. So granular access controls, that's that user management portal that you saw me start the demo off with. This is a pretty new feature. I think it came out around May or June.
And we completely revamped how we think of security. We've added multiple layers of granular, you know, granularity regarding not only read access, but write access as well.
You can add multiple layers within each data access group that you assign. So if I was, you know, if I was you, Lisette, I would just go into the help center, type out granular access controls, and not only will there be videos, they'll also be live, you know, working articles helping you navigate that feature. Now on the web report side, again, this is a pretty new tool that came out about a month and a half ago.
And, yes, we do have, you know, videos as well as articles in the help center to help you with that.
Okay. We do have a couple other questions that were sent my way. More in regards to the annual planning side of things, would this keep do differently than other FP and A solutions when it comes to specifically annual planning?
Great question. So I think with other tools, they're either forcing you guys to use prepackaged templates in the spreadsheet or completely revamping your processes and moving everything into the web. We give you the option whether you take a centralized approach to planning, your FP and A team handles it, or you take a distributed approach to planning and you send it out to your end users. But, again, your end users aren't really comfortable planning in Excel or if they're not comfortable planning on the web, you ultimately have the choice with a click of a button to present them data entry templates as well as output reports, not only in the web, but also in the spreadsheet.
We meet you where you're comfortable.
Great.
Hey. We have another question in regards to, sharing information and communication. What kinds of reporting and analytics does Qube have to help people communicate budgets back to the board or maybe stakeholders?
Great question. So we have dashboards. You know, there's a lot of articles on how to create dashboards, just a visual representation of your data. We have the different AI tools. Right? The smart variance analysis that ultimately generates a report for you and allows you to drill down into your data across your dimensions.
We also have the ability to use the AI analyst, not only in Slack and Teams, but also on the web.
If you guys want, you can obviously enable or disable this depending on who is using it. But, ultimately, this provides a really easy way of people being informed by the data that you end up pushing up to the cloud.
Awesome. We had someone ask, how can I build more detailed budgets in Qube, not just at the account level, but maybe by vendor or descriptive items?
Yeah. So it's really important to understand how Qube works at a high level. Right?
The the baseline of Qube is you simply call out what you wanna see in the columns and rows, and that is the intersection in which the data will write back to. Is it okay if I take over the screen share here, Jasmine?
Yeah. Please. By all means.
Perfect. So when I'm thinking about data entry templates, I can have a data entry template that looks like this as you guys saw throughout the demo, where it's simple. It's just planning at the GL level. But I can also have a data entry template when it comes to headcount planning that looks like this.
Right? Where my dimensions are still being called out. I have my entity dimension flagged, my department dimension flagged. That is the intersection in which the data will ultimately roll back to.
And then in the columns, I still have that combination of account, time, and scenario. Right? Working budget being called out there. So it's really it's it's highly dependent on the intersection in which you call out.
So when it comes to vendor level planning, there's two ways of going about it.
Personally, because vendor isn't one of my top level dimensions, but I still wanna be able to drill down into data to see the underlying vendor detail as you saw here. I can create an itemized schedule where I have a list of all of my vendors called out using a drop down. I give my end users the ability to plan the GL account, But my notes, the vendor, the entry date is that line item schedule that's that allows me to plan beneath the GL in this instance.
Now if vendors is one of your dimensions, you probably have an input template that looks like this, where you have a combination of account and vendors in your rows. And, similarly, you can provide your team with historical data pertaining to that intersection between account and vendor, but give them the option to now start entering data for whatever scenario you guys are working on for forward looking months.
Wonderful. Now I know that we're a few minutes early from ending, but if nobody has any additional questions, we'd love we just wanted to thank you so much for joining. Again, stay on the lookout for a part three as we're excited to be able to share that with you, when it comes to. But hope everyone has a great rest of their day and good luck with budget season, everyone.
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