Planning in Cube Ep. 3: Advanced Planning

Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Before we officially get started, I just have a couple of housekeeping items that I'd like to go through. So the first is the live q and a. Down below, there is a q and a section. You're likely gonna have a lot of questions throughout this presentation, and we're happy to answer them. So just drop them down in the q and a down below. We have Liban, who is a solutions consultant with us, who is available to answer those questions throughout the webinar. And if we don't get to them during the presentation, we have time reserved at the end specifically for q and a.

Next is the recording and slides. Everything you see here today is being recorded, and you will receive a copy of the recording as well as a copy of the slide deck in your inbox following the webinar. So be sure to keep an eye out for that.

Next is our survey. This is also gonna be coming to you in your inbox. It essentially just asks you how you felt about the webinar and our webinars in general. If you have any thoughts about future webinars you'd like to see, that's the place to leave that feedback. So please feel free to take a look at that.

Next is our office hours.

We have office hours available especially for this group tomorrow, I believe. So we are going to have a link to that in this slide deck, and you'll also get a link to it in the follow-up email following this webinar. So if we don't get to any questions that you have today or you end up having additional ones following the webinar, office hours is the perfect time to address those. So I highly recommend you sign up for that.

And lastly, this workshop series, this entire series is called planning in Qube. And if you haven't attended the previous two sections session. Sorry. We had one on budgeting and one on forecasting, which are both available to view on demand on the Qube website.

So we'll have link to links to those at the end of this slide deck, and you'll also receive links to them in your email following the webinar. So I highly recommend you check those out because all three of them combined, you're gonna have so much great information to get you started planning in Qube. So without further ado, I am going to hand things off to our presenter, Jim, who is head of solutions consulting here at Qube. And he's also been the champion throughout this series, telling us all about budgeting, forecasting, and now today, advanced planning.

So thank you so much, Jim, for being here, and I will throw things over to you.

Alright. I'm gonna steal this. Can you stop sharing, Alyssa, so I can steal it?

And last time, I shared the wrong screen, so let's make sure I get this right.

I think it looks good. Right? So perfect. As Alyssa mentioned, we've already done some sessions on the basics of getting started with forecasting and budgeting.

Like, how do I create an initial budget? How do I set up a template for planning? Some things to think about about how to distribute to your team, so on and so forth. So if you're looking for any of that content, go check out those previous webinars.

This one's gonna be diving deeper into more, you know, operational, like, revenue type planning use cases. And some of the topics we're gonna cover are using formulas and planning. Right? Qube has formulas, but we're spreadsheet basing.

You can use those. We also have the concept of a fetch range versus a publish range that we'll walk you through because it really can open up the possibilities of how you tackle your different planning exercises.

We'll talk about making your templates more dynamic and easier to use for your team around filter dimensions.

Pretty much every com company we talk to wants to do headcount planning a lot, wanna talk about vendor planning as well. So we do quick hitters and kind of some basics of setting up those as well. And then finally, we'll dig into additional hierarchies and dimensionality for those deeper use cases we might be tackling. So that's our agenda for today. Hopefully, you find it helpful as we go through.

And what we're gonna start is talking about formulas. Right? Any kind of model, any type of advanced planning, you're usually using formulas to drive things out. You're not just simply inputting numbers and and hitting publish. So what really drew me to Qube and as background, I spent over a decade in FP and A Consulting implementing t m one, Hyperioness space, and Adaptive is I love Qube's hybrid modeling methodology that we have here.

So what that means is Qubes can give you kind of the ultimate flexibility to model out how you need because we use the spreadsheet as our primary interface.

That means you can use both Qube formulas in the back end of Qube, but also spreadsheet formulas together in harmony to really make a dynamic, easy to change model.

And what you're gonna see is you're still gonna accomplish all the time savings you're striving for, but it's giving you the freedom to handle the nuances and complexities of your business. So for background, again, if I was implementing, like, a t m one, you basically ditch your spreadsheets, and you have to replicate your whole model in an application.

And a couple things might happen. Number one, you just hit something complicated you do in your process, and that system can't handle it. Or it's gonna cost you tens of thousands of dollars to, you know, program out all the nuances because each of these other applications have this really complex convoluted back end code and syntax to make that work. With Qube, we know that finance people wanna run their models. They want flexibility.

So that's what we've really, strived for in terms of how we set things up. So the kind of foundational piece we wanna dive into here is where should you write your formulas? And this is gonna differ customer to customer, use case to use case, but we have some simple high level best practices to help you figure out where you should book a formula.

So if your formula is simple, straightforward, if it's consistent across your model, and if it's fixed, right, it's not changing line to line, it's not changing scenario to scenario, then, generally, we wanna throw that cube or the formula in the back end of cube and let the calculation engine do that work for us. And the example I have here is a really straightforward one, which is a lot of companies that sell, a widget. Right? You have the volume of units you expect to sell.

You have a price. You multiply those two together. It tells you your sales dollars. Right?

That's not changing foundationally, you know, some plan to plan, you know, product to product. Right? It's always units times price equals sales. Now you're also gonna have formulas that are more complex, more fluid.

Right? Scenario one, I do it this way. Scenario two, I do it this way. Or variable based on what account you're looking at.

Maybe this account, I wanna do a trailing three month average. Maybe this account, I wanna plan it by taking that as a percent of revenue. Right? So those are more fluid, more complex, more variable.

Those I wanna do in the spreadsheet. So, again, hey. I'm trying to forecast out my consulting costs. Let's use the spreadsheet because that gives me tons of flexibility to do what I wanna do, and I'm also not spending a bunch of time coding in a trailing three month average formula into a platform because I might have lunch today and then change that formula afterwards because I've rethought my model and how I wanna approach it. So having both of these at your disposal makes you incredibly powerful. And, again, you're still gonna save all all that time around your process. So I'm gonna open up, a template and kinda walk through these concepts.

And as I get into it, I want you to think if you I want you to take away one thing from this session.

Think of your models in three distinct parts. You have the data prep. You have the actual calculations and logic, and then you have the data collection minimum, even if you don't want Qube to do a single thing in the middle, Qube's gonna save you with your data prep and your, consolidation of the data.

So it's gonna save you tons of time and give you that flexibility in the middle. So let's go look at this. So I'm gonna go pull up a a revenue planning template that I have here.

And first thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna just turn on my Qube sidebar. I already have this hooked up. So all the actuals and everything I have loaded into cube, like the number of leads, my historical close percentages, things like that, I'm just gonna hit fetch, and cube's gonna drop that in. So, again, the first phase of your modeling, if you have that data in Qube, you can fetch that into your template.

And a lot of that data prep work of getting all your numbers in the right spot to start planning, Qube's taking that off your plate for you. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna scoot out here to the right, and we'll walk through this model, quickly. And there's a bunch of stuff going on here. This is a software template.

I get that some of you aren't in SAS. Right? Every single, you know, customer even within a given industry plans differently. So I'm just gonna talk high level conceptually about some of these.

But in this model, essentially, what I'm trying to do is get to the number of deals I wanna close and the corresponding revenue bookings. And the way I get there is I have a number of leads by market segment, and then I have an expected close percent and then historical close percent by each of those segments and an average yield size. Right? I've got other stuff going on here like churns and renewals and upsells and implementation dollars and all that good stuff, but where we're gonna focus is up top.

So first off, again, I told cube, hey. Here's the numbers I want. We've loaded those into our database. So I just hit fetch, and they show up.

Now I'm gonna show you this blend of formulas here, which is I have some formulas in the back end of Qube, and I'll go show you an example, which, you know, we'll look at closed deals and bookings. Right? So those, if I look, I have my formula section up in our Qube web portal. I have added these into our data engine, and these are more straightforward formulas.

Right? So I have closed deals.

That is my close percent assumption times my number of leads, my sales qualified leads here. My bookings, that's my number of closed deals, which I've actually showing up down here, times my average deal size. Right? So I have these straightforward, consistent formulas in the back end of Qube doing my math for me.

Now if we go back to this template here, I have assumptions I need to fill out, and this is where I'm using the spreadsheet to drive this out for me. Right? So if I click on my expected close percent for July in the mid market, you can see I'm using a spreadsheet formula to do that for me. In this case, I'm doing a weighted average close percent.

I'm saying, give me the last three months, the average, multiply that by fifty percent weight, six months, thirty, twelve months, twenty. But, again, I might wanna change this. Let's just say, hey. Let's take the average of the last three months, but let's grow it by one point five.

Right? So I just boosted it up from, like, thirty one percent to forty four percent. And I just have formulas pulling it across time going forward all the way out, like, two or three years. Right?

So, hey. Here's my expected close percent. But maybe, again, I'm modeling. Hey. I want this to be a scenario where we slowly creep that close percent up over time, so maybe I put in different formulas.

But, again, I don't wanna go, you know, program that into the back end of the data engine because I'm ultimately being really dynamic and fluid around these assumptions around this plan.

Same thing up here. Maybe I'll do this. Like, hey. Let's do the average of the last three months, Grow up by one point two percent or twenty percent. Whatever it is. Right?

So I'm using cube formulas in the back end. So what that means, if I go, you know, flip this here and hit my publish button, Cube's gonna go ahead and grab these numbers out of the template, and this is that third part of the process. Cube is gathering the outputs of my model, booking them into the database. It's also booking in the assumptions, so I'd have those for reference and storage.

But now I can come in and that analysis comparing scenario two versus scenario three, which is the one I just updated. Right? Cube's doing all that heavy lifting for me. I no longer have to, like, compare two different spreadsheets and do all this data manual aggregation manually.

All I do is I come here, I hit fetch. And if somebody was like, Jim, what happens if we increase our increase our close percent in the mid market and our price in enterprise? I can be like, well, next year, we're gonna sell a hundred forty more deals. It's gonna mean five million more in revenue and one point four million more in implementation dollars.

And, actually, if we hit that plan, we'd have to hire six more people, and that's because I have a formula on the back end saying, hey. Take my expected implementation demands divided by some capacity assumption I've plugged in, and that's spinning out my FTEs I need to support that demand. All of that analysis, I got instantly using, you know, spreadsheet formulas in harmony with those back end formulas in my template. And, again, most of the time savings is occurring in that data prep upfront and then also on the back end, collecting and aggregating it.

So I'm gonna keep repeating it, but because it's a foundational, aspect.

Heaps gonna help with the data prep where it makes sense. You have the freedom to calculate how you need to, where you want to for the outputs, this, and store the assumptions, so on and so forth, and load that into cube so you can do that in their analysis across your variances. And maybe you're like, Jim, that's cool that we got the final results. But what what's truly different between these? Because we've stored the assumptions as well, I can go look at those. Right? So here I have my average deal size and my post percent assumptions.

These are booked in the queue. Right? So there's no formulas linking this, anything like that. I can just fetch this in, and I can see, okay.

Up here, my difference between the enterprise from my average deal size, we increase it by thirteen k, in v three versus v two. And, also, down here, I even put a little conditional thingy on here to flag it. Right? I increased my close percent in the mid market from thirty point six to forty four.

So I've used those formulas to drive out those values, but I'm storing them as well. And, again, that gives me tons of power to be really flexible and our customers like yourselves who are growing, changing, having that freedom is really compelling versus, like, trying to code everything into a back end and then ultimately having to rip out that code and replace it, a couple months later.

Awesome. So, hopefully, that gives you some ideas around how you can engage spreadsheet formulas versus back end formulas. We're gonna come back, and I'll show you something I was doing in the template, which is the concept of a fetch versus a publish range. And this becomes really important when we're doing a heavy spreadsheet formulas, and I'll show you why in a second. So by default, when you spin up a new template, a new view, something like that with cube, the ranges should be set up to both fetch and publish.

But depending on the nature of the template you're looking at, you may want to toggle off the ability to fetch or publish for specific reasons. And I'll show you how to do this in a second, but this option can be found up here in the edit. There's an edit icon in your sidebar, and basically pulls up this little item where you can rename that range if you have multiple ranges on a template or in a book. And then you can toggle off fetching or publishing based on your needs. So why would you wanna turn off fetching or publishing?

So if your template uses a lot of spreadsheet formulas to help create your plan or your published values, usually, I advocate turning off fetching. Because if you've used cube and or you've built templates, when you hit that fetch button, it will replace the formula in that cell with the number from cube, which is what we want to happen a lot of times. But if I have, like, a really heavy spreadsheet formula driven tab or report, I don't want it to wipe those out. I just wanna retain those.

So what you can do is you can have a refresh range or a fetch range with all your actuals and then a separate publish range next to it. So it gives you the advantages of both. Right? Cube's still dropping in all the data to save you the time, but then you're still saving the time on the back end with the publish where it keeps aggregating your numbers, storing the assumptions and the values, calculating the back end, and kinda gives you the best of both worlds there without having to, like, worry about, you know, wiping out a spreadsheet formula you might use.

Generally, last note, you can toggle off publish on your reports.

Generally, it's not a big deal because, you know, reports are at a higher level of detail. You can't publish there anyway. But if you like the peace of mind, take that into play when you're building out, like, a report. Hey. You can toggle off publish just if you need to. So let's go see this in practice. So we're gonna go revisit that template I showed before.

I think I just maybe have it pointed to a different scenario, so let's go pull this in. Right? So, again, here's that view. If you look at it, it's got a bunch of spreadsheet formulas in here. I deliberately did not put if error on there, so it showed up as a bunch of div zeros.

But, again, if I think about this, I've got kinda just two distinct data areas in this template. I have all my actuals flowing in that we've loaded in the queue. Right? That's going to inform my model. And then starting with my first forecast period going out, I think it goes out a couple years here.

These are all published values. So what you're gonna notice is I have a fetch range. It might be tough to see, but, essentially, I have a range that's looking at it b six through x one forty three. So, basically, it's all the way out.

And I told it, hey. We're gonna have a fetch range that's gonna pull actuals into my template, and then I want a publish range. So I already have a publish range in here. But to create a publish range, all you have to do is include the same kinda row headers.

So I just have them hidden in a grouping here. But you literally can add in the row headers, take the time periods and the scenario or the scenarios you want.

Highlight this. So I'll go all the way out to the right. Drag this down.

And then, I guess, it goes pretty far. One forty three. So then I can go add a new range, and then, you know, I'd hit select. He would read this.

It would say, I recognize this, but this is where you'd want to toggle off the publishing or the fetching. So So I just come up here. I could change the name, and then I just said, hey. Let's toggle off the fetching.

Right? So I just added in that third range. Realistically, I would be using, you know, the the first one I created, this publish range. But now if I come back and go to my fetch, right, this one, I believe, I toggle the off publishing.

Oops. I have to go click this. Should be good here. There we go. Toggle off publishing.

But now I can fetch all my actuals into the template.

Now if I come up to the right, all my formulas are populating. And then when I start to do my inputs and my adjustments, right, I just flip it to my published range. And as I start plugging those in, I hit publish, keep gather as all those outputs, so on and so forth. So this is a really cool piece of functionality because it allows you to retain a spreadsheet driven model, gives you that flexibility to model and, you know, calculate things the way you want, but it's removing all the formulas that are more of a headache.

Right? VLOOKUPs and index matches and and and whatnot and some ifs are powerful, but they're a nightmare to re retain. Right? I don't wanna have to worry about this cell and worry about the formula where it's pointing to a data dump tab to go find thirty seven.

Cubes dropping thirty seven into the template for me. So I remove all the headache around the data prep. Cube drops it in. Then I have my formulas that I want to be active on.

Right? That's my, you know, assumption or driver formulas. Right? Weighted average, percent of revenue, whatever it is, and I can publish those in.

So as you think about specific, you know, planning use cases, there are going to be areas of your model that you want to be more formula driven, take into account, hey. I have the ability to toggle off my fetch and create these two ranges to make it more dynamic for yourself and a lot more powerful.

Cool.

We're gonna keep plugging away here. I'm gonna jump back.

Alright. Next thing, this is like a template design best practice.

That's accounting for what I would call your filter dimensions. So for any given template you have, there are going to be top level dimensions or dimensions that maybe don't apply to that template.

So there's kinda two ways you can handle those extra dimensions that aren't relevant for that specific task you're accomplishing.

One is you can just leave them in the cube sidebar.

So the benefits to this are that the lists are always up to date. It's faster for, like, an initial setup, something like that. But it makes it kinda not super intuitive for your end users sometimes, and it's not as transparent of what you're looking at if maybe you toggle off the cube sidebar. So what you can do is you can bake what I would call filter dimensions into your spreadsheet, and I'll show you an example of this next. And what that's gonna allow you to do is it can make the template more intuitive for your end users, and it's gonna reduce some confusion potentially.

And it gives you a lot of creative options in terms of how you can lay out your templates and make them dynamic.

Couple, you know, easy drawbacks here. You just need to make sure you maintain, like, a pick list of your department. So if somebody added a new department, hey. Just go make sure you update your template or your pick list.

Also might add a couple minutes to your template setup. But for me, the time say like, the extra ten minutes on a template to make sure it's lined up versus all the time somebody might be asking me questions, of, like, why can't I hit publish? Well, you're not filtered to the right thing. I think it outweighs, that.

So we'll walk through what that looks like to account for filter dimensions actually in your template. So to do that, I have a basic OPEX template here. Right? So I've got, you know, all my OPEX accounts.

I've got, you know, my actuals for, you know, twenty twenty four, my reforecast for the end of the year, and then I have my budget. So this looks like a standard template. I can turn on the cube sidebar. We'll just make sure it's synced up to the right cube because I've got tons of cubes here.

But now I can go ahead. And in this case, I do have it set up to both fetch and publish on this one. But I'm gonna go ahead fetch, and keeps gonna drop all my history in here. But I have to, like, maintain and make sure everything is accounted for properly on this cube sidebar because maybe I log in as a user, and it's telling me, hey.

You know, you're filtered to all departments. But if I turn this off, like, I don't know what these numbers are because, you know, the spreadsheet's not telling me. Sure. I can turn on my cube sidebar, and it'll tell me exactly what it's pointed at.

But having the ability to have a different view or a different lens where I can kinda bake in those filters into the template so I don't have to poke around and navigate this list, really compelling, especially in use cases where I'm distributing out templates to large audiences. Like, I wanna dummy proof it as much as possible so people aren't asking me questions. Maybe I'm just selfish in that regard, but I think you probably all appreciate that. So what I have here is a similar template.

The main difference is up here versus on this one, I don't have that context. So up here, you'll notice I have what scenario we're working on, what department, you know, five actuals through a given year, my plan year, stuff like that. So you can make this really dynamic with different drop downs and filters. But what you'll notice between the two is here, I don't have any dimensions in my filters like I do here. That's because I've essentially baked them into this spreadsheet. So what's happening is if I open this up, because I just let me get rid of this. I was playing around something before.

Let's not confuse anybody.

I essentially have a drop down list, and this is connected. So if I wanna go, like, do a plan for the accounting team, this is just a basic formula saying, hey. What's that cell say I need to do? And then what Qube does when it reads this row is it says, okay.

I need to get the salaries for the accounting department, for the US entity, and then product and market aren't relevant for expense planning. So I'm just defaulting into product and market. So I basically dummy proofed this template. And now when I hit batch, right, cubes can go dig up all those data points and drop them in the template for me.

Right? So now if I wanna go flip this to, like, the marketing department, first off, I know from looking at this template right away that I'm looking at the marketing data because it's right in my face. I don't have to go explore the sidebar.

And now I can just flip that, and it makes it really easy, intuitive experience for me as an end user. So anytime you're getting into planning and you're distributing it out to your teams, dummy proof it as much as possible. Drop those extra dimensions into the rows or the columns depending on kind of the layout of your template, And it make your life a lot easier because you'll be asking less of those. What's why isn't this publishing?

Well, it's because you didn't filter to your department specifically or whatever it might be. And, again, this still takes into account any security you might apply. Right? So if I don't have access to the marketing departments and if even if I try to, like, hard code it or, you know, circumvent the system, it's still gonna say, Jim doesn't have access to marketing.

I'm not gonna show him any of this data or let him change any of this data. But it's a really cool technique to be able to go ahead and and plan in in different layouts and make your templates more dynamic.

Again, you can just set it up, include those dimensions in the rows or columns, and you should be good to go.

Alrighty.

Let me pull this back up. Alright. So we've talked kind of formulas. We've talked fetch versus publish range, including your dimensions in the grid.

Let's go talk about headcount planning. We could spend a whole hour on this. We might. Coming up, we'll see what what Alyssa thinks in terms of, our next agenda topics and things like that. We're gonna just gonna hit on this real quick, and I believe we put in a poll here, Alyssa. We just wanna get a gauge from the audience of how often in general in terms of your cycles.

How are you updating your headcount plan? Right? Annually, semiannually, quarterly, monthly.

I'm not doing that today. And this doesn't have to be with Qube. If it's with Qube, great. But even if it's you're doing it outside of what does that that process look like. So I just wanna get a gauge in the audience how often do our folks updating their headcount plans.

Alright. See what our results are.

That seems actually I mean, I didn't have thirty nine percent as a guest for monthly, but it seems pretty similar to what I hear from customers where some just do it, you know, once a year, some twice a year, majority doing, like, a quarterly refresh or a monthly refresh. So, hopefully, with Qube, you can get into cadence where you're doing this more often. But let's go look at kind of a a standard headcount template. We'll take some of those lessons and and thought processes that I was just talking about, and bring those here as well.

So as everybody here on this call knows, like, headcount can get really complex. You know, maybe you have international employees, different tax rates, benefits, or it can be really simple. We have some customers that just they don't even get into detailed headcount planning. They just plan it by department, a total dollar amount.

They have rough assumptions where benefits are x percent of salaries or whatever it might be. For a lot of you, though, you might have something that looks like this, which is like a big list of your employees. Right? So who they are, what's their title, how much they make, you know, maybe a bonus calculations, maybe a commissions, benefits, four zero one k, different state taxes, whatever it might be.

The key here with Qube is, I would say, the more nuance complexity you have into your process, the more you want to lean on the spreadsheet.

So in this case, you can see I didn't rename this, but I believe I've turned off fetching on this one because I'm using mainly spreadsheet formulas to drive this out.

And we have starter templates for headcount if you wanna go check those out.

You wanna, like, hey. I wanna do this. Do you have something I can go going with? Yeah.

We have a a template that has a lot of this built in. But this is essentially taking, like, hey. Take my annual salary amount, drive it out across the months, take into account the start date. But out to the right, I'm doing my tax calculations, benefits, so on and so forth, my FTE headcount, so on and so forth.

But, again, I can, you know, take into account any types of formulas I might want. And this is where I'd say, again, because I've set up these other headcount planning applications and adaptives and team ones.

Like, you can spend months of consulting dollars trying to perfect this, And then all of a sudden, you're like, well, I wanna account for if somebody goes on maternity leave and that nuance. Well, I could go in a system and program that in the back end, or you could just come in here and type zero for three months and beyond with your day and save yourself a bunch of money. So with Qvar approaches, like, hey. Let's take advantage of the spreadsheet.

But the key here is if I go in and, like, go add a new employee into this, and I'll just copy this in, copy this down for the sake of time. Let's go add my oldest daughter in, Wesley Bolas.

Gonna hire on her birthday, August eighth. Give her a big fat salary.

Right? Now I'm gonna publish this in. What Keap's gonna do is it's gonna gather these up these inputs. If we think back to some of the previous webinars, right, we can grab attributes of data that are in this template to, you know, hey. Let's snag some of the things about this individual. But now I'm publishing in this update to the plan.

It's grabbing it on itemized individual person basis.

I've turned off that fetching because I don't want it to screw up my formulas in the template because I want the power and the freedom to make sure it's programmed exactly the way I want to. And I don't wanna pay somebody thirty grand to go set up headcount calculations.

Right? So right now, keep publish that in. I can come back to my template, and then up here is I have a line. I don't have a formula or anything like that.

But since I've published in my headcount outputs, now they're summarized in the cube. And now I can go ahead and see, you know, who's coming in to the team. Right? So I can see my daughter, Felicity, joining on the eighth or yeah.

That's her birthday, the eighth, seven year old. And then if I wanna be able to use, like, a drill down because I've captured that extra context, I can drill down here and I can start to see, you know, okay, who makes up those the people that make up that monthly salary amount, assuming you will have want to open this up. You know, there's security considerations here you'd wanna talk through. But here I have somebody making six hundred grand a year, who is Felicity, and she's a marketing manager.

Right? That seems pretty steep. No offense to our marketing managers out there, but probably not making six hundred grand. So now I can see that, you know, maybe I go change that input, that update on that headcount template.

So key there. We'll probably have deeper sessions on headcount, but if you wanna use one of our starter templates, we have a bunch you can reach out, or you can go peruse our our library and go find those to get started with.

Right? So I'll I'll pop back up here to my slide. Right? So when you start working with headcount, you know, items to consider that might dictate different templates and layouts, and all these are possible at queue, which is like, okay. Do you have mostly salary, mostly hourly employees? Because maybe I plan by role as opposed to named individual.

How detailed do you wanna get with benefits and taxes? Right? Do you wanna keep it high level, like, just a percent of salary, or do you wanna actually get into, hey. If they're on this plan, I want it to be seven hundred dollars a month towards the company, whatever it might be. Do you wanna make an extra assumptions like attrition, merit increases, security considerations that you need to think about?

Do I allocate employees to different departments? Right? All this can be done in a spreadsheet template and then publish back up into cubes so you can aggregate that immediately, access the detail where it makes sense, and go from there.

So I jumped the gun a little bit there. But next, let's talk about vendor level planning.

And I think this is our we have one more topic after that, which is additional, like, dimensionality. But we'll start with vendor level planning.

And the key kind of decision is really gonna be based on, do I want to bring in vendor as a dimension into queue? And some of you may already have. Or just do I wanna plan by vendor, but I just wanna keep it as, like, a line item detail. And, really, what drives that decision is, are you consistently doing BVAs by vendor?

Right? If so, we'll probably add that as a dimension in the back end of queue.

If not, itemized templates are a really good route to go that aren't gonna, like, add extra hierarchies and, you know, dimensionality in that you're really not gonna take advantage of. So note here, we don't wanna bring in, like, an extravagant number of vendor codes. Right? So if we are considering adding vendor in as a dimension to the back end, be mindful of that. Right? We might wanna bring in maybe one to two hundred key vendors that we plan and maybe group the rest into an all other.

And, you know, we can access those large volumes of vendors via transactional drill down where it makes sense. So think about, like, who are the key vendors I care about versus if I came in and bought one of your products. Like, you don't wanna go, I'm not or maybe I sold you, like, I've mowed your lot for sixty bucks or whatever. Like, you're probably not gonna dive into that.

Right? But it's those big, like, maybe software hosting vendors, whatever it might be. So I'm not gonna again, this could probably warrant this entire hour by itself. But a couple key things to think about, if I come back here and look at dimensions Right?

This is where if we need to add that extra vendor dimension in for, BBA purposes. Right? I've got my accounts, my department, scenarios, time periods. Here, I have a list of vendors.

Now what I would recommend I'm not practicing what I preach on this one. But if you have a way to organize your list of vendors, that helps. Maybe it's by vendor type. Even if you don't, if you have five hundred vendors, group them by something.

It could be just alpha. Here's all the a vendors, b vendors. Just helps to group things as opposed to having a big long list. But if you need to do BBAs by vendor, what you'll see is that extra vendor dimension here.

So if I go back to this template I have actually, I have another vendor one. Right? So when you set up your template, you're essentially accounting for that vendor dimension in here. But what it provides you if you do have a vendor dimension is you can look at the history by vendor where it makes sense.

Right? So now if I'm doing planning, I can see what I spent on Google AdWords last year, and I could view it month over month if it makes sense. And then, also, I could do something like this report, which is, like, doing BBAs by vendor. Right?

So I can say, okay. What did I spend in this given period on this vendor?

How much do I expect to spend? So maybe you know what? I'm way overspent on rhythm one this year. Right? We've spent one point one versus what we had planned on spending seven point four two. Maybe I wanna drill into the actuals and see the transactions. I could do that.

But I can see I'm, you know, still favorable by four hundred k, across all my vendors. Right? So that gives me my remaining budget. So it'll gives you power to do this type of analysis. But, again, not everybody needs to get that detail.

Sometimes you can have, like, an itemized list. This is more of a travel view, but I just have, hey. Here's all my vendors that I need to plan my expenses against. In this case, instead of travel expenses, it might say software.

And you could still drill into this detail. Right? If I go publish in the details I have here and the notes and the commentary, we talked about this in one of our previous sessions around template setup and things like that. But now I can have an itemized list. I can still access that detail if I go refresh this here and look at my travel expense line.

Let's wait for it to come populate here.

Here we go. If I wanna see, like, hey. What makes up that two hundred sixty five k? Right?

I can click drill down here, and now it pulls back those four line items of detail. Right? So it'd show me the four vendors perhaps that I have targeted. So, really, what it comes down to is, do I need to do BBAs all the time on vendors?

If it's yeah. I do vendor BBAs every month. Let's throw it in there. Let's shrink that list to the vendors that make sense.

If not, and it's just I wanna plan by vendor, that's where that itemized template can come into play, and you don't have to worry about, like, bringing in vendor. Because maybe your vendors just aren't clean in your database. We see that all the time. Right?

Like, hey. We have a vendor field in my source system, but it's not clean. I don't like the way it's organized. That's fine.

You don't need to bring in vendor as a dimension to do BBAs. You can still, you know, access that, be like a transactional drill down where it makes sense as well.

Alrighty.

One more quick topic to hit on before we, you know, go ahead and address questions and whatnot. And, yeah, keep the questions coming. I see there's a bunch of chats and things like that.

I'll we'll have, Lee Van address those while I'm talking through this.

And that's gonna be additional dimensions for planning and use cases. So maybe you just started off with your financials. You're like, hey. We're considering, you know, bringing in revenue data because I wanna do revenue reporting, revenue planning.

So always think about your hierarchy is relevant to that use case. So I'll kinda talk through two here. One is, like, hey. I have my financial data.

And for financials, I view my data by time period, obviously, actuals budget. I have the entities. I have my chart of accounts, and then I have departments and vendors, and that's how I manage my financial data.

I also wanna now bring in revenue. And for revenue, I use the kind of the same things. Right? I have time periods. I have scenarios, entities.

I have my metrics. Right? It's not financial accounts, but I'm tracking sales, pipeline, whatever it might be. But I like to slice and dice by product, sales rep, and customer segment.

Now it's important to kinda think about here is if I'm building a financial report, I don't want to have to think about sales reps or customer segments because I I don't have those baked into my GL data.

Vice versa, if I'm building a p and l, I don't wanna have to worry about sales rep, on that end, right, or vendor, whatever it is. I might have said it backwards. I think you probably get the idea. Right? When I'm doing a specific task, I don't wanna have to worry about extra stuff that's not relevant. So what you can do, and you can work with our team as you start to think about these expanded use cases, is you can have a second cube.

So that's a second set of data, second set of dimensionality that's specific for a given use case. Sometimes you bring two different datasets in the same cube. We have most of our customers are doing that. But as you start to get deeper and have more dimensionality around your planning, a lot of times, a second, a third, a fourth cube, you'll want to use those to really enhance the way you can plan and slice and dice.

And to show that real quick, it's pretty easy to navigate that. You know, I've been kinda bouncing back and forth because I have a bunch of demo environments, but it just shows up as a toggle up here. So you could pick, like, am I looking at my financials cube or my sales cube for this report or template? You can report from multiple cubes in the same tab, same report, everything like that.

So there's no concern there. When you're managing it, up in our web portal where'd it go here?

Same thing. It's just a little drop down up here. So really easy. Again, as you start to think about your expanded use cases, talk to your CSM, your CSC, your foe your your person at you to ask about that if it makes sense when when we wanna bring in it.

Because most of the time, in general, you're probably bringing in another dataset, like connecting to Salesforce or HubSpot or a sales ledger from NetSuite, whatever it might be for your specific use case. So talk to your team because you wanna get that data flowing in in you. So that being said, we'll open it up to questions. I'll shut down my video share.

Might spin it back up if there's something that's relevant. But what do we got, Alyssa and Levan?

Alright.

Okay. It looks like Liban just answered one that came through.

One that had been asked a couple of times that Liban did answer, but I'll bring up again just in case. At the beginning, when you were talking about, revenue planning, it was asked, is this based on having Salesforce connected to Qube, or how do you have the sales metrics in Qube?

Yeah. Great question.

So in my example, we were connected to Salesforce to bring those metrics in, but you do not have to be connected. If you just have that data in a spreadsheet, there's actually a couple of approaches. One, you can connect into a sales ledger, whether it's Salesforce, HubSpot, just sales detail sub subledger in your GL or your EFP, I should say. So you can have those flowing in. If you just have that data in a spreadsheet, you can publish those data points into cubes so they're stored there. Or I talked about the three phases of building a model.

One is the data prep, two is the formulas and the logic, and three is the collection. You don't necessarily have to use Q for that first step. So if you're just trying to do revenue planning, you're just like, hey. I just wanna collect the output so I can compare my scenarios.

Great. You don't need to go worry about building out a connection to a Salesforce or something like that to do that. You just need the metrics in the back end of queue to publish into. So the short answer is yes.

In the example I was given, I would be connected in so it's flowing in, but you don't necessarily have to. If you wanted to get something up and running quick, you don't have to wait for that connection. You can just take your existing template and publish the values in.

Awesome.

Next question. So I noticed you were using Excel during this presentation. I use G Sheets. Is there any difference?

Great question.

Everything I showed you is in ex in Excel is the same in G Sheets. Also, I was on a PC.

Everything is the same PC to Mac. So, it is a tad slower, John, in Google Sheets. That is a factor of Google Sheets, not Excel. Because you can actually use it in Excel online, and it's just as fast as in Excel. But every click, every, you know, action functionality is identical between the two, two different spreadsheet interfaces.

Right. Alright. Next question. How does queue get the numbers back to the ERP?

Okay.

So it's a good question.

I would say this. For most, like, individual plans, you're probably not sending the numbers back into ERP.

Like, most of the time, what we see is, like, once you finalize a budget or something like that, that's where you would use our data exporter to download a file, and then you can import it into, like, NetSuite or Sage or whatever you're using. So, usually, we don't advocate, like, refreshing, like, plan data once a week, once a month back into your source system. There are some customers of ours who are using Qube for, like, demand planning and publish it back because maybe they have production inventory models that might be connected to a demand plan. So in most cases, they still just use our data export. Otherwise, we do have an open API.

And if you have anybody with API skills, they can use that to access your data inside a cube whenever they want.

Great.

Another question that came up a couple of times, people were asking about templates and where they were available, if they were available, what you were using.

Can you shed some light on that?

Yeah. We do have template libraries.

Normally, we have our knowledge center person on who can shoot the links off. We'll we'll follow-up with those in our follow-up email, like, the links to our template libraries because we have starter templates for just reports, like free statement models, cash forecast, things like that.

A lot of the templates I was showing today, we have similar starter templates for that. So we will make sure that link gets out to you guys so you can utilize those if you want.

Awesome. Yeah. So be sure to take a look at your inbox after this. And then final question we'll ask for today.

Someone had said, would these concepts apply to cash forecasting as well?

Yeah.

Great example. Usually, cash forecasting because you can get detail there. That's where other datasets start to come into play. But at a minimum, if you have a financial forecast of, like, here's how much I expect to spend on payroll, here's how much revenue we expect to bring in, That's usually a a task that a smaller group is using.

Right? It might be a couple people in finance as opposed to a big distributed process. So that's where usually when I set those up, I lean more on spreadsheet formulas because I can do things like project out my collections. Like, hey.

I'm gonna take the period one period ago, I expect to collect seventy five percent of that in the current period, whatever it is, and, like, kinda waterfall it backwards.

So that's an area where I lean a little bit more heavily on spreadsheet formulas. One, because it gives me more flexibility. Two, because it's a smaller group that are, you know, interacting with that specific plan. It's really just a question of what you wanna do with, like, pulling in, you know, current AR, AP, cash balances, things like that. But, definitely, the concepts I showed apply to cash forecasting as well.

Awesome. And then we did just have one more come in.

Publishing a budget for expenses is pretty straightforward, but what are best practices for publishing a budgeted balance sheet? For example, CapEx purchases will only impact AP slash cash and fixed assets, balance sheet only accounts. Do people just create an Excel model that independently calculates our BSPLCF and then publish the final results to q?

Yeah. Usually, I see, like, specific areas get more tactical there. Right? Like, AR, I mentioned to your point around your your your assets, your CapEx.

Right? Because you're calculating depreciation, everything like that, that would potentially hit the, you know, all the statements from that perspective, but also the, you know, the cash and balance sheet impact of those purchases as well. So, yeah, usually, we'll see, like, a CapEx specific template, for driving those out. And then depending on how detailed you're getting on any specific line item, obviously, things like debt, and whatnot, sometimes folks will get really detailed there, if they have a bunch of loans and whatnot and, you know, schedules around those.

So, yeah, usually, you're gonna have, like, separate templates dedicated to your more detailed areas of the balance sheet, but similar concepts would apply there.

Awesome. Alright. It looks like we addressed everything in the q and a and the chat.

So thank you everyone for asking those questions.

Now I think I'm gonna go in and share my screen so that we can share some resources with you.

Okay.

So the first, as I mentioned before, is to watch the entire planning in queue series on demand. So once this webinar finishes, we're gonna get it up on the website, and you're gonna be able to go to our webinars and videos page and check out all three of the sessions that were part of this series. They'll also be linked in the follow-up email that we're sending after the webinar, so be sure to keep an eye out for that.

Next is office hours, which I also mentioned at the beginning of this session. If you have any additional questions today that we didn't get to, office hours is your chance to ask those questions. So you can click the link here and sign up for the upcoming session, which should be tomorrow.

Next is our free template library. So a lot of you are asking questions about templates, and where you could access them.

Here is your chance. We have the link right here.

Also, I believe that there are some updates happening to this library. Lee Van touched on that in the chat and in the q and a. So be sure to keep an eye out on our template library for updates, in the coming weeks, months.

Next is our newsletter, The Finance Fix. This is written by our very own Christina Ross, who is our CEO of Qube and also a former three time CFO.

She shares lots of great finance advice, tips, quotes from other people in finance, and she also links to a lot of great content that she finds useful and helpful in her day to day. So definitely a great resource if you're looking to stay in the know when it comes to finance.

Next is our strategic finance pros Slack community.

This is available for you to sign up for if you're looking to connect with other finance professionals like yourself. You can ask questions, give other people advice based on your experience, and there's also an opportunity to see job opportunities, content that you might find interesting and relevant to things that you're going through. There's a lot that gets posted in there by multiple members, so feel free to go check that out. And lastly is our help center. If you are in need of help when it comes to using Qube, this is the place that you go. There are lots of great articles on there, demos, links to things like the templates that we mentioned earlier.

So definitely feel free to check that out if you are in need of some additional information.

And with that, I think we did it. Thank you so much, Jim and Lee Van, for all of your help today, and thank you everybody for tuning in. Again, be sure to keep an eye on your inbox. Lots of great stuff coming your way.

And until next time, I hope you have a great day. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.

Planning in Cube Ep. 3: Advanced Planning

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