Video Transcription
Happy Halloween, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Before we get started, I'm just gonna go over a couple of quick housekeeping items.
So first is our live q and a. You're probably gonna have a lot of questions throughout the presentation. There is a q and a button down at the bottom of your screen. Please feel free to put all of your questions into there. We have Livan, a member of our team here to answer them throughout the presentation.
And we'll also have some time reserved at the end in case we don't get to them throughout.
So, yeah, just drop them in there, and we'll be sure to get to them at some point.
Next is the recording and slides. Everything you see here today is being recorded, and you are going to receive a copy of that recording as well as a copy of the slide deck, in an email following the webinar.
And last but not least, there are going to be plenty of FP and A tricks in this presentation. But since it's Halloween, we didn't wanna leave you without a treat. So down in the chat, I am going to be dropping a link, for ten dollars to get some coffee. You just have to enter your name and your email, and you can redeem your gift card through the link that I'm going to drop in the chat in just a minute. So keep an eye out for that.
And without further ado, I'm going to hand things off to Jim Bullis, our head of solutions consulting here at Qube, who is going to be taking you through the presentation today. So, Jim, all yours.
Yeah. Fantastic.
Can you send me that link too, Alyssa? It'd be great.
Happy Halloween, everybody. I dressed up as somebody from the IRS today, so probably the creepiest thing I could think of. But excited to walk you through a a cube today.
Just a quick intro. I head up our solutions team here at Kiva. I've been here about three years. But before that, I worked in, as a consultant in FP and A implementations for over a decade.
I used to implement Hyperioness base, TM one, and headed up at adaptive practice over at a consulting firm. So excited to share, you know, how CUBE can help some of these FP and A problems that have been around forever. And if you have experience with any of those platforms, hopefully, you like what you see today. So I'll just do a brief overview of who we are at CUBE, and then we'll go through we put the top five, but it's just five of the FPNA nightmares that are out there.
I'm sure you have your own.
We'd happy to be talk talk to you about those in more detail, but we'll walk through those. So I'm gonna jump and steal the screen. Do you wanna kill yours, Alyssa, here?
Alright.
And should be good. So we should have that same agenda up.
So real quick. Right? I mentioned a couple of other FP and A technologies that I've implemented in the past. There's tons of them out there. What Qube does in the FP and A space is we're really the first spreadsheet native FP and A platform.
Now in my past, the goal was always, hey. Let's get you out of spreadsheets. Right? They're, you know, tedious to work with. You got formulas everywhere, huge data dump tabs. So the goal is to move you into, like, a web based interface to alleviate those problems.
What I found is that most folks that moved to those ended up back in spreadsheets anyway because either it was too expensive to stand up and you relied too much on consultants. And when your business would change, you didn't have the money to go up holding up to, you know, make those changes to your model in one of those applications. So you ended up doing all your modeling back in spreadsheets again.
So Qube's approach is, hey. Let's take the interface that finance folks are most comfortable with, which is the spreadsheet, and let's just optimize that experience by bringing in a enterprise level data engine in the back end in the cloud and allow you to do all your processes and reporting right where you want to. Now we do have great web based, you know, applications like dashboards, things like that that I'll show you today. But, really, where Q comes in is because of that approach, what you're gonna see today is a really intuitive, easy to use platform compared to some of the outdated platforms that are out there. We have really long formulas or syntax and coding you have to learn to go do it. Right? We're going for a no code, easy, scalable approach to your problems here.
So real quick, before we get into the demo, the last thing I wanna show is kind of the data flow, which will match up, on the left side to most FP and app applications. Right? So we have our database in the cloud.
And what we're gonna do is we're gonna go connect into your various source systems that you want to centralize into kind of central finance source of truth. Right? So we'll call and connect into NetSuite or Salesforce or Bamboo or whatever your tech stack looks like from a CRM, HR, HRIS, or ERP.
And then we centralize that data. And then most of your interaction will be in the spreadsheet still. Right? You're still gonna run reports, update budgets, things like that.
But ninety five percent of that manual time you spend there is gonna disappear and allow you to be a lot more nimble, spend more time on analysis, drive more scenarios and plans, so on and so forth. So think of this flow as we go through. Right? I'm gonna be doing cool stuff in spreadsheets, but that's dependent on us bringing that data into a central source of truth, and, ultimately, that means grabbing data from your source systems.
So let's get into it. Let's show you, let's talk about some FP and A frights.
The first one, the phantom of the ad hoc. Right? If we think about ad hoc reporting, right, you might have really detailed discipline processes, but it doesn't help when the CFO asks you for a report on, you know, at noon on a Thursday and you have trick or treat at at night or whatever it might be you're doing. Right?
So why is this a nightmare? You usually have tight deadlines. Somebody's looking for insights really quickly, get data scattered across multiple sources. You're trying to aggregate that together, and there's a high risk of, you know, doing a wrong query or data dump or missing a formula, something like that, and giving the wrong numbers.
Right? So it's a complete time suck to try and go build an ad hoc report. So how are we gonna banish that? We're gonna use Q.
So I love starting with building a report from scratch using Qube because it really is gonna emphasize how easy it is.
You should look feel really comfortable, but that scalability, that flexibility is really highlighted here. So what we're gonna do is maybe I get a ad hoc report request from Alyssa. So I would probably look something like this. Right? I've just got a blank spreadsheet, and I wanna go put together a report. And Alyssa actually asked me for a report that has data from four different datasets.
She wants my operating expenses from my ERP, NetSuite. She wants some Salesforce data, and then she wants my FTE count from my HR system. Right? That's three.
And then she wants to see actuals and budget. Right? So those are my fourth dataset of that budget. So what I'm gonna do, because I have cube, is I'm gonna turn on cube, and this is gonna allow my spreadsheet to start talking to that database I was just talking about where we've centralized all that data.
So I've got this sidebar here in Excel.
I'm gonna be working in Excel to start. Everything I do works identically in GSheets. So I'll go open it up in GSheets later to show you that. But every single click you see me do here works in GSheets as well, works in Excel online, works on a Mac, works on a PC.
Wherever you are working or your team is working, you'll be able to do the same exact click. So I wanna go build a new new report for Alyssa. I'm gonna click on new here. And what you're gonna see are what we call our dimensions.
Essentially, these are your business hierarchies. Right? So I've got accounts and departments and scenarios and time periods, and maybe I have entities or products or markets. Whatever your business hierarchies are, you will see those here.
This will be custom built to what you need. But let's go start building that report. And, again, my key takeaway for you as I start to navigate this is, hey. This looks really intuitive.
This looks really easy to fire up something from scratch. Right? So I'm gonna go drag accounts into the rows. Alright.
And what you can see is I've got all the datasets that I pulled in and the associated metrics. Right? So you see I have my three statement model for NetSuite. I've got Salesforce data, HRS data.
Right? So Alyssa wanted my operating expense accounts, so I can just click on that. It'll grab them. She also wants that Salesforce data.
So I'll grab bookings. And then finally, she wants to see FTEs. Right? She's very picky about her reports.
Great. Now I'm gonna pull in time, and she wants two years of data. Right? If I wanted to do this, this would usually take me a while to pull together all these data points.
So I just grab all twenty three, twenty four. And finally, I'll start with actuals. So I'll say, hey. Let's just pull an actuals.
I'll add everything else down below as a filter, and this is where it gets cool. I hit fetch, and boom. There's my report that Alyssa wanted. And it took me all of ten, fifteen seconds if I wasn't yapping to go ahead and produce this.
So what I can see is I have data from the three different datasets to start. I have my operating expenses up top from NetSuite or QuickBooks or whatever it might be. I've got Salesforce data here, and then I have FTEs. It's all on one spot, all organized, laid out exactly how I need.
But the key here is there's no crazy formulas, code, logic, anything that I had to do. I just drag, drop, made a couple selections. You're not gonna see a formula up here, like a v lookup, a sum if, an index match, those risky formulas we wanna try and get rid of. Right?
So what that means is if I accidentally delete the data, no big deal. I'll just hit fetch again. Cube's gonna go reread my report, pull the data in. So really cool.
I've got this report fired up. Next, I'm gonna show you, hey. You're probably gonna wanna make this look nice before you go send it off to Alyssa. Right?
So what's cool is because I'm in a spreadsheet, Excel file, G sheet, doesn't matter, I already know how to customize this and make it look the way I want to. Right? I can go insert some blank rows here. No big deal.
Maybe I'll throw some bolding on these same rows just to make it look a little nicer and have things stand out. Right? But the key here is that formula or that formatting doesn't get blown away. Right?
I can just go ahead refresh the data, and we've essentially built Qube to honor your formatting changes. Right? So if you insert rows, you can take things out. If you change it bold borders, you'll see a bunch of different templates I've built out.
Right? Use all kinds of different formatting, but you already know how to do this. We're not gonna make you sit through, like, a forty hour report builder training to go do it. You know how to format a spreadsheet the way you want.
So we're giving you a really intuitive interface, and we're putting it in the spot you already know how to operate.
Now take this a step further. I mentioned you can take things out if you want to. Right? I could have untoggled my quarters, when I built this out, but, you know, I can just manually delete them as well.
But let's say you wanna go add some stuff into this. Right? Again, there's no code I have to worry about. I can go insert some new columns, and I'll be like, hey.
I wanna add this in for Alyssa. I want to show her actuals, but I wanna show her June twenty three a year to date, and I wanna show her a trailing twelve month total.
Right? Now I hit fetch.
Now Keap's gonna go talk to the database. It's gonna find the values, you know, aggregate those for me. I don't have to manually do any work. All I did was literally type in give me the year to date values, give me the trailing twelve months, and boom.
It's there. Right? So then we have some of these sucks suffixes we'll teach you how to use to get rolling with that. But, again, I don't have more than the twenty three, you know, the six months of twenty twenty three showing, so it's going to grabbing the six months from the end of twenty twenty two as well.
So really slick, really easy to spin something up, to format it the way you want, to add things in. Right? And maybe I wanna add in my FTEs up here instead. Right?
I don't know why I would do that, but we'll just go fire this up. Right?
I can go type in FTEs, hit fetch.
Boom. Here comes my FTEs into this spreadsheet.
Next, I have a bunch of detail that makes this up. Like, I'm querying this essentially at a higher level of detail. Like, I haven't drilled into departments or entities, but we are actually loading data in all the way down to the transactional level. So if I see a number and I'm interested in it, I can click on that. So I'll look at this two point four million.
Right? I have a drill down button on the side here with Qube. And when I click on this, what Qube is gonna do is gonna ping our database and find every transaction that makes up that number. So in this case, I clicked on paid ads, I believe. Let me double check. Yeah. Paid ads for the trailing twelve month total.
So I can see here I've got, you know, my trailing twelve months, and I've got about, almost two hundred transactions.
And you can kinda see the breakout of my core business hierarchies, but we also have what I would call transactional details out here as well. The memo, the transaction code, the transaction date. You're probably gonna have twenty of these. Right? Journal entry type, posting date, vendor, whatever is relevant to you at that detail level. Qube's gonna pull that right back to you so you don't have to go dig back into NetSuite or QuickBooks or Sage or whatever it is that your ERP is. You have access to that right in the friendly confines of your spreadsheet here.
Awesome. So we built this. We've added some formatting, some layout options. We've added in some new columns.
Last dataset we wanted to bring in is this is all actuals data so far. You can see this model is only updated through July. Probably gonna need to get on top of that. But I wanna go see budget for the end of the year.
I can, you know, simply just change it, the word from actuals to budget. Again, there's no coding or anything I have to do. I literally can make that small change, and Qubes can go reread these columns now and drop my budget data into this. And I'll talk about how we get these budgets in in a couple of minutes here.
So, hang tight for that. But once we have budgets forecast, so on and so forth loaded into Qube, right, we can pivot and slice and dice and build these types of reports really easily.
And then once you have a report, it's kinda like, you know, set it, forget it type of deal. Right here, I have a report I've already built out and connected to Qube. I can go ahead and hit fetch. So maybe this is I've already formatted and laid it out the way I want.
Qube can drop the numbers in every month, so you don't have to, like, rebuild everything every time. Right? You can set up reports. Maybe I'll bump this forward to July, and I wanna see this year to date.
I just have, like, little toggles built in. Keeps can go ahead, pull those values in for my year to date. Or maybe, hey. On the fly, I wanna go add a new column in.
Go insert.
Somehow I turn in Copilot. Let's go. Fire in my forecast for twenty twenty four, right, and go fetch that in. So if your team already has formats, layouts, things like that that you like, you can hook right on to those as well and start dropping numbers in so you don't have to manually do that.
Awesome.
So from a reporting standpoint, hopefully, this removes some of the fright you currently have. Right? All those vlookups, sumifs, index matches everywhere, huge data dump tabs, having to rerun it after somebody had books in a new entry, so on and so forth. With Qube, we've got that data flowing from your ERP, for example, into our database. So all you have to do is, you know, if I clear out all this data, hey. You know, Joe Joe made a new entry. All I have to do is refresh my report, and I'll see the impact of that change reflected in my reports.
Awesome.
Let's jump back into our frights here.
Fright number two or nightmare number two. I know what you did last budgets. Right? So this is all about starting off a planning cycle.
I'm sure a lot of you either in the middle of budget season have either kicked off or about to, depending on your fiscal calendar. But, usually, it's a huge pain just getting going in a few spots, getting your dataset, like a new budget, but also creating templates. So I'm gonna talk about both. But, you know, why is starting your planning cycle such a main a nightmare?
Right? We got tedious prep work that's gonna eat up tons of time. Right? I've worked with teams that used to take weeks to get their budget cycle up and running, let alone trying to do a forecast, something like that.
You kinda have limited options in terms of getting things going. Right? You're stuck with the data, you know, layouts you have. It's difficult to go build new plans, so on and so forth.
And a lot of customers I talk to are like, hey. It'd be great to, like, bring in, like, statistical trends and use my data to project forward, but we just don't I don't have the time to, like, go do that work to create, like, new values. Right? So how we're gonna banish that is we're gonna use Qube to build a first pass of our plan.
So to talk about that real quick, we have a few options with Qube. The first one I like to advocate is kind of our first, you know, foray into AI here at Qube, is we have a Qube smart forecast. I'll show you what this looks like where you can go in and say, hey. Build a plan for me. Go build my first pass of the budget before I send things out to my team.
So I'll show what that looks like. But also with Qube, right, if we've loaded in historical data or we have existing budgets and forecasts and aspects thing is like, hey. I already have a rolling forecast. If you're doing that, great. We can use that to start your budget. You know, maybe I'll take my current year forecast actuals. Right at this point, we have, you know, probably a ten plus two ish, nine plus three at least, hopefully, if you're doing regular forecasting.
You'd push that forward or just, hey. I've got trailing twelve months of actuals. No matter kinda what makes sense for you or, like, a zero based budget, I'm sure a lot of you might be doing that as well. But we'll give our team, the budgeters, a first pass to react to, and we're gonna use Qube's kinda smart forecasting to do this.
So this is how we go get that first initial budget rolled out before we distribute it out to our team. And to do that, I'm gonna go pull up what we call our web portal. So, essentially, this is where, like, an admin of the model would come manage your structures, your your hierarchies. This is where we load in our data and just say, hey.
We wanna refresh our NetSuite data into Qube every night at five AM, whatever it might be. But this is where you set up your chart of accounts, you know, maybe department trees, custom dimensions that you have. Right? So everything will be custom built based on your business's structures.
But the cool piece here is I have this scenario area. And I'll talk more about, like, multiple passes and things like that for a little bit. But when we're loading in data, we're loading it into our actual scenario.
But then I wanna go create, like, a new base budget. So I'd mentioned a few of those options. Right? We can, you know, go ahead using a rolling forecast, take our last twelve months. My favorite one to show here is we have this new smart ports forecast functionality. So what this means is I can say, I wanna go and build a new base budget. So I could even call it, like, base budget.
Call it one because I already have one. I can pick and choose what I want to create a new starting point for because maybe I don't need to do everything. Maybe I'm just playing in my income statement. And then I can say, hey.
I this is gonna be a budget, so I want it to be for twenty twenty five and through December. And then finally, what do I wanna use as my source? So I'll actually say, like, hey. I've got a bunch of good actuals, but you we all know what happened in twenty twenty.
Some COVID stuff going on, so let's just start in twenty twenty one. And then in this model, we only have actuals, let's just say, through September at the moment. Right? So it's basically saying, hey.
Look at twenty twenty one through twenty twenty four. Go spit out a statistically driven forecast based on my history for me, and that's gonna be my starting point for the budget. And maybe before you actually give it out to your team, you'll go in and make adjustments based on known factors and things like that that you know. But the key here is you're taking a lot of heavy lifting off your plate initially to go through and create a first pass of a plan.
Just let the computer do it, and you can react to it. We also see folks using this functionality to, like, do a gut check against their plan. Like, hey. I've already created a budget, and my team's gone through the process.
What does the computer think we would do? And then you can, like, compare and say, is there anything that's drastically off that I wanna go dig into a little bit? But a really powerful functionality to go build those new plans. So as we get into it later, what we're gonna do is I'm gonna have that base budget, but then I went and created a new budget off of that.
And I said, hey. Let's take, you know, my base budget and make a copy of it. I called it, like, budget or working budget, whatever it might be. But now I can compare back to that scenario.
So we'll talk more about that in a second here.
Cool. So this is me just kinda running through the mechanics of creating an initial plan. Right? But now we have to go, like, create a template for our team.
And if you're like any of the other customers I talked to that don't have cube yet. Right? Invasion of the template snatchers here. Right?
Creating templates is really painful.
Number one, right, you're spending hours wrangling all the data and getting it into a template for your head of marketing to go react to. Right? There's high risks of errors involved manually updating these sheets, maybe copy paste something in the wrong spot. Your formula is pointing to the wrong spot. Just again, I've seen customers take weeks to get these ready. And then once you send it out, head of marketing fills it out. Now you get it back.
Even if they didn't screw anything up, you still have to manually gather those insights, consolidate them into kinda maybe one central spot. And then guess what? The head of the marketing department, Lee Van, changes something you need to rerun through that process. Right? So we're gonna use Qube to kind of banish those, you know, pitfalls of having to do this manually.
And what we're gonna do here is I'm gonna go show a kind of finished budgeting template first. This one's already been formatted, everything like that. Right? So I've just kinda laid out a oops.
Actually, I'm gonna go into one thing before I do that. Let me touch on this real quick because the template I'm about to show you, there's some things you wanna think about before you go build this out. So first, is this gonna be a centralized or distributed process? Because this is gonna dictate how you set up your templates.
Right? Am I making a template per department head? Am I just doing everything myself? And I'm gonna talk to the department heads, and I'll update the numbers.
Next is how far out are you planning? Right? If you're doing a budget, it's probably just through the end of the fiscal year, next year. But am I doing a rolling forecast?
Same things apply. Is it twelve months, eighteen, twenty four months? Is it through the end of the next calendar year? Whatever it might be.
Ideally, if you're using a system like Qube, you're gonna have history in the system. Right? So how much history do I wanna include? Usually, it's good to include at least a year of history.
Probably not five years of detailed monthly history. So what's that right balance? What are those right trends you're looking to help your team capture? And then lastly, what's great about Qube is your team could have existing templates and views.
Qube can hook right up to those. So we're not gonna make you, like, ditch what you're doing today unless you hate it. Like, if you're like, my template's terrible, I want to use something new. You can use one of our templates.
You can build it from scratch, so on and so forth. And then we like to have summary views because we wanna be able to track the progress. Right? I wanna see what changed between my new plan and my previous plan that's gonna allow me to, you know, see the impact in real time that my team's making.
I'll be able to flag noteworthy changes. Right? Does somebody double what I put in there for them, like, flag it? And it's gonna give me the power to do what if analysis.
Right? Maybe I'm sitting in a meeting and, you know, Alyssa asked me, Jim, what if we do x y z? I can get back to her immediately as opposed to saying, hey. I'll get back to you tomorrow.
So let's talk about these templates real quick.
And, again, I'll pull this back up. This is a kind of standard planning template I've seen with hundreds of customers. Right? I've got my various expense accounts that I want them to plug in.
I'm giving them last year's history or the current year history, I should say. Maybe I have some months of forecast in here, and then here is my budget. Right? So before Qube, I have to spend hours and hours and hours gathering all these data points, getting them right into the right spot.
With Cube, same as you saw me doing reports, I can go ahead, just turn on the sidebar. I've hooked it up to Cube, and now Cube is gonna go pull in all that data for me. So I don't have to manually do that anymore. Right?
No formulas, no copy paste, nothing like that. Right? I have just hit the fetch button, and Qube's like, oh, Jim needs our current budget amount for promotional items for January twenty five. Boom.
It's thirty five k. Let's put that in there for Jim to go react to. So really slick because think of all that prep time to run a cycle.
You don't have to do that anymore. You just kinda create an initial plan. You create the tent layout of your template, and you're off and running. Right? And for this, just to give you a quick teaser, like, I literally just said, hey. Give me my OpEx accounts because I wanna go plan those.
So I just clicked on that. And then I said, hey. I want, you know, twenty four and twenty five, but I don't want my quarter subtotal, so I can just, you know, untoggle those. Right? So this is essentially gonna be kind of the template you saw me build here. And then lastly, I just threw my scenarios up top.
So this can be unformatted. So the other one I'm looking at just says some some nice polish and things I put on it for my team. But, essentially, this is kind of the framework I've built out for that report. And then I said, hey.
I wanna see my forecast or reforecast here, I think it was. And then this is gonna be my budget. Right? So as quick as this, I can go ahead and build out this template, put some polish on it, and it's basically ready to go for my team.
And then I can just go ahead and refresh this in. Right? And then all those numbers will flow right into my template for me. I'm no longer manually doing that.
So, again, I just have a more polished version of this, and we'll go ahead and do that. Now I'm gonna head back here to my web portal.
And what you can see is for those of you who have either used GSheets only or have a mix, we here at Qube, like, our finance team uses Excel.
I'm one of the only people that's on a PC using Excel, and most of our team is on Macs.
But a lot of our team I mean, we primarily use Google Sheets to collaborate. But this is where it gets cool because this is a planning template. Right? So it's the same one you saw me kinda playing with down in Excel.
We're just up in Google Sheets. But if I'm like, hey. I'm gonna mark it in, and I wanna go, you know, starting in July next year, I want to rent office space for the marketing team. Right?
Without Qube, you go you come to this template. You manually gather all these data points out of it.
Maybe you like it back in Excel, whatever it might be with Qube. I can hit this publish button. So what the publish button does from a planning perspective is it sweeps through a template.
It's looking for updated numbers, and it's booking those back into the database. So in the same way we have actuals flowing in from, like, our ERP into, cube, we're gonna gather these inputs from a planning template and shoot those back into the database.
And now and I'm the head of finance, and I'm kinda checking things out here. I might have a summary view, something like this, and I can go ahead and hit fetch, and I should be able to see the impact of those changes. Right? So my marketing department increased by sixty k.
Maybe I'm curious where they made that change. I'm in Excel. I do not have to go dig up their G sheet. I can just hit fetch.
This is, like, an by account view. So now I can go ahead and see that, you know, that sixty k hit my rent expense line. Again, there's no formulas. Obviously, there's no formulas that talk between Excel and G Sheets.
So what's cool is I hit the publish button. I see the impact of that change immediately at whatever lead level of detail I want. And what's probably better is I don't have to worry about any of that manual work associated with that. And then, finally, I can even come back up here.
We do have a full audit trail. So if you ever, like, wanted to dig into a specific change, here I can see I'm in central time. So I can see, okay, I'm on Halloween at twelve thirty ish, central time. I work for Qube, but it would say gym here.
Updated budget for January for marketing for the US, and the rent account went oh, where is it? Rent account.
Went from zero to ten thousand, and that is the change. And then here's where Jim was using Google Sheets on this exact template, this exact tab within that template. So it tracks every single aspect of that change.
So really cool. And then I'll come back here.
We've we've created our template. We've started planning in it. Nightmare four is the twenty eight scenarios later. Right? So managing your scenarios becomes really critical to, like, a finance process here. Again, what's so painful about this?
You're gonna have limited visibility into changes between scenarios without doing tons of work. Right? So it's difficult to track assumptions and changes, like what changed between this plan and this plan, so on and so forth.
You have the risk of using outdated data. Like, if you have disconnected spreadsheets, things like that, or maybe a wee ban on my team made an update, and I didn't catch it. So now I'm comparing two plans, and neither of the one is the most current one because I don't have that kind of integration. So saving off versions for reference and analysis is gonna help, be huge here.
And one thing I like to recommend is saving off, like, an initial plan. Like, because maybe you like just like to have, like, a really collaborative iterative budgeted process. Still save off your initial one because inevitably somebody's gonna ask you, like, hey. What's changed between your initial Outlook and your current Outlook?
Right? So this is gonna help you track track changes and progress. It can highlight who hasn't started and who hasn't been making changes. And, again, you can answer what's changed.
The other thing that's really great is you can save off scenarios throughout your cycle. So, like, let's just say you're running a budget and you have an application like Qube.
I advocate, save off a copy every week, just Friday, Monday, whatever it is. Make a copy.
It you can always get rid of them after your file, cycle is finalized. But just having that copy of, hey. What what was it on October thirty first? It's gonna help you answer questions, get insights.
Right? So what I like to have is, like, a working version, but you can also just save off distinct fit, passes. Right? Like, hey.
We're officially doing the second pass of the budget right now. You can name it that way so your team has better clarity into what you're doing. And, again, it's allowing tracking and visibility into your cycles and those changes.
Again, make it easier to answer what's changes. And then finally, when you have something like Qube, you wanna lock down those scenarios to ensure that no one changes something that's been frozen and locked in place. So if I come back up to our web portal here and show you that, right, you can see here I've got this right access. So this is saying, hey.
This is my twenty twenty four budget. Right? We're we're almost done with twenty twenty four. Nobody should be changing our budget for, like, the last two months.
So it's just a nice little toggle on here that says, hey. Block it down. No. I did I hit that right?
Okay. Block it, so that nobody can change this. So it's frozen in time, in place, so I'm not going, and changing things out from under folks. So quick example of that.
Right? Here's more of, like, a revenue plan. And I like to showcase this because because we're in the spreadsheet, we get the flexibility to use spreadsheet formulas to do our plans. Right?
So this is kind of like a a SaaS model.
Right? Number of leads that I have, and I'm trying to get to, hey. How many deals do we plan to close? What's our corresponding revenue bookings?
So the way I get there is I have an assumption for close percent by my market segments. I have an assumption for number of leads, and I have an assumption for average deal size. And then behind the scenes, if I come back here, we can store formulas in the back end of Qube to do the math for you and help you track these scenarios. So I'm gonna go to my SaaS model here.
What you're gonna see is keeps doing some of the math here. So my closed deals saying, hey. Whatever Jim enters in as a close percent assumption and a leads assumption, let's, you know, do the math and calculate how many deals we're gonna close. Say for bookings.
Right? How many deals I'm gonna close, That's my average deal size. So this is math that's happening in the data engine.
What's cool here, though, is if I'm actually building this plan and I need to forecast my out months, I want to be able to have the flexibility to plan these numbers however I want. And because I'm in a spreadsheet when I'm using Qube, I can use spreadsheet functionality to go build out my numbers. Right? So in this case, I'm doing a weighted average close percent. I'm saying take the last three months, weight that fifty percent.
Last six months, thirty. Twelve months, twenty. Whatever it might be. But what's cool if I'm like, you know what?
Let's just take the average of the last three months, and we're gonna grow that by one point seven or one point five. Whatever it is. Right? So we're boosting it up to forty four percent in the mid market.
And then maybe it's in the enterprise that we're gonna change our average price to eighty k. Right? So I've made those changes, and I'm making them to budget v three.
And now, again, I'm hitting publish. It's gonna gather those numbers. It's churning through those back end calculations.
And now I can compare it. So this is where those scenarios can come into play because if, you know, Alyssa was like, we're in a meeting, and Alyssa was like, Jim, what happens if we increase our close percent and our in the mid market and our average price in the enterprise? I'll be like, well, I don't have to wait till tomorrow to do a bunch of work. I can tell you right now, Alyssa, that's gonna mean five million more in revenue because we're gonna sell a hundred thirty nine more deals in the mid market, which actually means one point four million more in implementation dollars. And if we were to hit that, next year, we'd have to hire six more people because I have a formula on the back end here that's saying, hey. Take my implementation demand divided by capacity assumption, and it's gonna spit that out for me. So using scenarios with q, gonna make it really powerful for you to, you know, track changes, drive what ifs, so on and so forth as you go through your processes.
Cool.
Alright. Last thing I'll show before we wrap up today, board deck from the black lagoon is gonna be our our nightmare number five. So, specifically, this is gonna be visualizations. Right? And when when I think visualizations, I think both board decks. Pretty much every one of our customers has to put together g slide decks, PowerPoint decks, for their stakeholders. Right?
And it's usually a nightmare because there's tons of tedious manual labor to gather the data and produce those visuals.
Data changes and need to rework. Right? Something changed, I need to redo it. And I have lack of real time insights to the data.
It'd be really great if I could have, like, a dashboard where somebody could come in and interact with the data on their own time, and they would ax have access to that real time data. So we're gonna use Qube, our f m a platform, to assist with those back backboard decks and dashboarding, as we go through here. So let me get rid of this real quick, and then I'm going to go to first one of my Excel files again. Let's go to this one.
Let's actually jump back to this template, because I wanna show hey. I'm wanna put together a new chart real quick for my board deck. I need to show my market results by quarter for revenue. Right?
It might take me an hour to go dig up that by quarter by market, or I can be like, hey. Give me east, west, and central.
And I wanna see that for q one twenty four and q two twenty. Right? So I've literally just said, here's the numbers I'm gonna go I wanna go find. Now I don't have to go dig dig those up.
I can just tell Qube, hey. Let's add another section to this report when I click on this. And and I hit select, and Q will read it. So it's saying, hey.
When I'm looking at b fifty five through d fifty eight, which is this little section here, I see the time. I see the markets. I hit fetch. Here comes that data.
And as quick as this, I'm gonna go build a new chart.
Alright. This one looks as good as any, so we can fire that in. So the natural extension of this from, like, a visualization standpoint is our customers will have something like this, which is a, you know, a G sheet and Excel file. But they have all the visuals they need for their board deck. Maybe they need new ones. But, essentially, you just have cube kinda hovering above the template.
And in this case, it's looking at d forty four through t sixty three. And whenever I come in here every month and hit fetch, it's just gonna drop those numbers into this table, which in turn will go ahead and update my visuals. Those are synced into my g slide deck or my PowerPoint. And I was talking to one customer who used to spend nine, ten hours a month running their board decks. Now it takes them twenty minutes. Right? They still double check everything, update the narrative, add a new chart here or there, but tons of time savings on this visualization, creation.
And then finally, the other piece is gonna be like, hey. I want a dashboard.
Right? I want my team to be able to come in and poke around and get answers to questions in real time without ever gonna ask me. Right? It Seems like a dream scenario.
Not a nightmare from that perspective. So with Qube, we've got dashboards. These can be custom built to whatever you need. Right?
You see lots of different options here. You can filter in, like, hey. I wanna see the last twelve months, or I wanna see data for a specific department or whatever it might be. Or I can go click on, like, hover above items.
It'll give me more details.
I can click on a portion of our chart, and it'll give me the ability to, like, dig in, like, drill into deeper levels of detail, smaller charts or not smaller charts, the normal sized charts, but detailed charts that can show me an anomaly if there's something off of the data.
And then, finally, I can have as many of these dashboards as I want. So if I want, like, an executive dashboard versus a, finance team dashboard versus department head dashboard versus a, you know, sales dashboard, great. You can go crazy with dashboards, as you see fit.
So let me just, I think, pull this up. I'll pop this back in. I think we're almost done here.
I think we're done. Alisa, we can open it up for questions. I know I covered a lot. I covered ad hoc reporting, kind of bill taking existing reports, building templates, plans, so on and so forth. So, hopefully, as insightful, the voyage we took here today through, the cube demo.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jim.
We do have some questions coming in, so I'll just get right to them. The first one, do you have standard cube models that you build, say, from Business Central slash other ERPs?
Yes. So we have a bunch of prebuilt connections to a lot of the standard, ERPs that are out there. And then within that, we do have a, excuse me, a big glossary of starter templates and models that you can use. Last I checked, we had over fifty, like, starter templates, things like that in our our glossary there that you can use to go get started. But, if you don't have one of those standard ERPs, that's fine too. We're connecting into new systems. Basically, every week, I hear of a new ERP that's specific to some industry.
And in general, we can connect via APIs. We can connect via JDBC protocols with SQL queries or some systems or or some IT teams are like, you're not connected to my system. I'll give you a, a a Excel file, flat file CSV, and you can load that. We can automate that too if you drop a file on the location. We can swing by and pick it up. So pretty much no matter what your source system is, we can go ahead and grab data from it.
Great. Next one. We use classes for the department. Can that piece use in this tool?
Yes.
Yeah. So it sounds like it might be a quick QuickBooks person. Yeah. You can bring in classes, and you can call it whatever you want. So if it shows up as class in your ERP, but you wanna call it department or cost center or whatever it might be, you can name them however you need. But, yeah, we work with customers that have projects and initiatives and locations. So whatever the codes are that you use as part of your accounting string, those can be brought into Qube to match your business structure.
Great. And someone asks, if you could explain the open AI.
No. Open we have an open API.
So that That's probably what it means.
No.
No. AI is a a important term as well, so I'll cover both. So we do have a we do have an open a API. So that means you can access the data from Qube in other fashions if you want.
Also, you can send data points into Qube if you got API skills. So that's from, like, our API data ingestion and connection, standpoint. From an AI perspective, we have our first release was kinda that smart forecasting. We have two more that are queued up that I've seen the prototypes on that are pretty close.
The next AI initiative we have is what we call, like, a, smart variance analysis where you basically say, hey. Compare let's just say it's tomorrow, November first, and you're, like, compare actuals for October to budget for October and spit out the biggest variances at the detailed level so I can go and, you know, put appropriate comments on it. And then it saves you the time of, you know, running through those.
The third item we have queued up from an AI perspective is gonna be, like, anomaly detection. Like, is there a data point that came through that's way off compared to maybe what it should be? Like, flagging that so you can take action or identify data issues more quickly than maybe you could just naturally today.
And, piggybacking off of that last question, is there an open API support available within Cube's team?
Yes. So if we can, we do have API docs. We can drop those in the chat.
Otherwise, follow-up. We can send you there. And then, yes, we do have support within the team. So if you are trying to go do that, we have resources, customer success engineers who'd be able to guide you through that API experience.
But I don't wanna scare people for most systems. If you have, like, a NetSuite or QuickBooks, we already have that stuff built out, and it's just plug and play. Like, hey. We'll go plug in and that's where you start pulling the data in.
So it's only for those folks who are really savvy around that stuff, who wanna do their own unique stuff with APIs. You can go crazy. But for most finance people I know, myself included, aren't skilled API developers. Right?
They're just like, I need to get the data from here into Qube. That's where our team comes in. We'll build in those connections, flow the data in for you, tie it out, all that good stuff. That falls on our team's plate at the the onset of all our projects.
Awesome. And just to let everybody know, in addition to the recording and the slides that you'll receive after the webinar, we're also gonna include the questions that were asked along with any links, that Jim has mentioned, recently.
So you will receive links to the template library and other valuable resources.
Somebody asked, how long does implementation typically take?
Yeah. It's a good question. It depends on a few factors. Right? What we're connecting into, how many sources we're connecting to.
Obviously, if we're connecting into NetSuite, Salesforce, an HR system, and a data warehouse, right, that's gonna take longer than just a QuickBooks. So and we stage our projects up into three distinct phases. There's, like, the integration and setup where our team's doing most of the work to get the data connected, flow it in, tie it out. And then we have, like, a a short training period or I call it, like, driver's ed.
Right? We build the car. We teach you how to drive it. And then what's great and different, about Cube than most other vendors I I've worked with or, you know, worked for is we have what we call a ninety day activation period where, basically, you have a customer success engineer who's kinda riding alongside you as you go through your first couple monthly cycles to be, like, answer questions, help you with templates, as you're getting running.
So it's kind of those three distinct phases. It can vary based on what we're trying to do. But in general, we have a really fast, like, integration time for something like QuickBooks. So could that be, like, two weeks or so that we would go hook that up?
And then we'd start training you, and then you'd start using it and rolling it out kinda during that activation period. So it's a unique, you know, strategy in the space, but we give you really quick type of value. And we get you personally in the driver's seat of these templates, these models versus, like, being dependent on consultants. Our goal is to make you self sufficient with the project product, as early as we can.
Great. And somebody asked, what's the license slash subscription pricing structure for the user?
Yeah. So this is kinda unique to Qube as well. The only thing we really charge for is admin licenses, which is, you know, usually each organization has one or two.
With the platform subscription, you get unlimited view only and unlimited, like, budget or forecast or licenses. So anybody who wants to view a report, who wants to contribute to a budget or a plan, those are all included as many as you need. You really only add in an extra licenses for, like, the folks who manage the back end and, you know, do security settings and things like that. So pretty unique as well.
Great. And someone wanted to know, is there a nonprofit discount?
Yes. You can talk to us, and we'll walk you through that.
Alright.
Awesome. Well, it looks like we've covered all of the questions. So thank you everyone for submitting, and thank you, Jim, for answering all of those and leave in for being so vigilant in the chat.
Now before we let you go, I am just gonna go over a couple of quick resources with you so that you have some next steps following today's webinar. It would help if I shared my screen.
There we go.
Alright.
So first, if you like what you saw here today, but maybe you have a few questions that you didn't get answered right away or you wanna dive a little bit deeper, you can book a custom demo. And we will take the time to go through anything that you want us to go through, answer all of your questions, and help you see how Qube can work for you. So be sure to click that link if that sounds like something you'd be interested in. It's also gonna be included in the email that we send following this webinar.
Next is our newsletter, the finance fix. This is written by our very own CEO slash serial former CFO, Christina Ross. She is just full of so much financial knowledge and has a lot of great contacts in the space who also like to contribute tips, tricks, and anecdotes from their experience. So this is a great resource if you're looking to stay in the know, with what's going on in finance and FP and A.
So I highly recommend subscribing to that. And lastly is our strategic finance pros Slack community. If you're looking to connect with like minded finance professionals, provide and or ask for some advice, be aware of job opportunities that are coming up, receive different types of content, that could help you in your career, this is a great place for you. So highly recommend signing up for that.
And I believe that is the end. So thank you everyone so much for taking some time out of your Halloween day. We really appreciate it and had a great time spending time with you. If you have any questions, feel free to reply to the email that we're going to send you after this, and someone from the team will reach out.
And without further ado, thank you so much, everyone. We hope you have a great rest of your day. And thank you, Jim and Lee Van.
Yeah. Thanks.
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