Planning in Cube Ep. 2: Forecasting

Video Transcription

Welcome. Thank you so much for being here today, for our second session in our planning with cube series. Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping items to go over. So the first is our live q and a. You're probably gonna have a lot of questions throughout this presentation.

I encourage you to throw them into the q and a down below.

We'll have one of our team members answering questions throughout the session, but then we also have time reserved at the end specifically for q and a. So if we don't get to your question right away, just hold tight. We'll get to it at the end.

Next is our recording and slides. So everything you see here today is being recorded, and you're gonna receive an email following this workshop that contains a recording of the webinar and the slide deck. So be sure to keep an eye on your inbox for that. And speaking of your inbox, we are also going to be sending you a survey separately that basically just asks you what you think of our webinars and workshops.

What you liked, what you didn't like, what you'd like to see in the future, we'd love to hear it from you.

Fourth is our office hours. So today, like I mentioned, you're gonna have a chance to ask questions. But if you wanna go a little bit more in-depth and have some additional questions that you weren't able to think of today, we have time reserved tomorrow at one PM specifically for this group to ask questions about cube. So feel free to sign up for that. That is going to be, included in the email that we're sending to you after this as well. And lastly, the workshop series, the one that you are viewing right now. We already had one session on budgeting that some of you were probably in attendance for.

And the next session that's coming up after this one is advanced planning on October twenty third. So we're gonna add a link at the end of this as well as in the email that is being sent to you following the workshop. So you can sign up for the third session of this series and also catch up on the first session if you happen to miss it. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce our presenter, Jim. Jim is our head of solutions consulting here at Cube Software, and we are very lucky to have him here today to present for us.

He knows a lot about forecasting. So, Jim, I am going to hand things off to you.

Perfect. Yeah. Great to meet everybody. Just for my background here, I've been with Cube for three years, but I've been in the FP and A tech space for about fourteen years helping folks like yourselves implement, FP and A technology. I used to implement TM one, Hyperion s space, and, Adaptive, for about eleven years or so before joining CUBE. So excited for our session.

And as Alyssa mentioned, we've already done session on budgeting. If you haven't seen that and you're about to kick off budgeting, go check that out. This is gonna be how to jump start your forecasting processes. So a lot of you maybe have run a budget with Qube. Maybe you haven't done any planning with Qube. This is, hey. How do you get started with a forecast cycle?

And, you know, preview for that next session, we'll be doing more advanced types of techniques and planning using Qube and really show you how to get the most out of your, investment there. But for today, we're first gonna highlight how Qube's gonna save you time with forecast and how to, like, rethink going about your cycles.

And that'll lead us into some key questions we wanna answer or you should be thinking about before you get started with your process. And then we'll actually do some live demoing, firing up a first forecast, actualizing plans, using Qube to do that for you, some template design best practices, and then talk about how we distribute, these templates out to your team. And then finally, we'll wrap up some pro tips, things about, like, what if scenarios and whatnot. So as Alyssa mentioned, fire questions in the chat. Our team is here to support and answer those, but I'm gonna steal the screen share here, Alyssa,

Alright.

Nice snafu to get us going. Right? So we're gonna just kick off with data time savings. Right?

So as you think about your forecast cycles, especially those who are just doing budgeting, forecasting, so on and so forth, right, Qube is gonna drastically decrease the amount of time you're doing data preparation and and dumping your files or dumping your data into your files. So you're gonna be able to fire off cycles more often. And, secondarily, cubes gonna handle all the collection of your plan data, so you're not manually taking all that time to collect and summarize your inputs anymore. Cubes can be doing it for you.

And finally, you're gonna be able to compare and analyze your different scenarios a lot more quickly. So, you know, kinda ditch maybe your current mindset, which is, hey. It takes forever to do our plans today because of all this manual work. Cube's gonna help take that off your plate so you don't have to manually do that anymore.

Right? So we're gonna jump in. And before we start showing off how to get set up with Cube, we wanna answer a few key questions or have you think about a few key questions, right, as you're building out your your your plan and your cadence and your cycle. So first off is, how often are you gonna be planning?

Right? Again, maybe you're only doing a budget today. You wanna get to quarterly reforecasting. Maybe you're quarterly and you wanna get to monthly.

Maybe you're monthly and you wanna get to weekly.

Get that hammered out upfront because all these questions I'm about to ask you to think about, none of it really has to do with the cube technology. We're gonna make it all easier. It's more, hey. You're gonna have to build a cadence with your team around these processes, and you wanna put dates in the calendar, so on and so forth. So figuring out how often you wanna plan is really important so you can start to establish those internal processes.

Same thing. Who's gonna be engaged in this cycle? Right? We're gonna be forecasting. Is this the same team that budgeted, or is it more condensed group?

Next, what level of detail are you going down to? Right? Are you planning at the same level of the budget? Are we going up a level?

And then finally, how far out are you looking to plan? Right? Is it just kind of a current year fiscal forecast, or are we rolling doing, you know, eighteen, twenty four months out, whatever it might be? Right?

So let's dive into each of these to give you some things to think about. So first off, how often? Right? So we mentioned semiannually, quarterly, monthly, weekly.

Whatever it is, we need to drive out that process.

And without Qube, it's very common for teams not to forecast as frequently as they'd like, do the daunting kind of manual nature of executing those plans. So Keeps gonna make it easier for you, and we'll show you how to spin up those new forecasts, how to actualize your plans, so on and so forth. But if you're looking to try and get into, like, a best in class cadence, most best in class teams are reforecasting at least every month. A lot are doing it more frequently.

Like, there's there's a factor here. Is it okay. Am I planning individual weeks, or am I just updating my plan weekly? I think the more you can be in the platform and updating your forecast, the better.

So, you know, again, as you're, like, planning out the next year plus, like, how you wanna begin forecasting, pick what makes sense for you. Right? Qube's not gonna force you into any given path.

Next, who's helping?

Right? Qube's gonna make it easier to engage more people in the process. A lot of you might be like, hey. The budget cycle is so daunting. We have to engage with so many people. I don't wanna do that every time for forecasting.

That's okay. But just know, Cube's gonna take all that manual work off your plate in terms of collecting the data. So you can choose to engage that same group of folks in a forecasting cycle because it's not so much manual work to distribute and collect all that data anymore. So, again, maybe your finance team's like, nope. We don't need to reengage everybody or maybe you only do it on a, you know, quarterly basis, but the finance team's monthly reforecasting.

With the cube, we can do all of the above. But start to frame up, okay, what makes the most sense? Who do I need to, like, bring into this process?

Again, cube's gonna make it easier no matter which way you choose.

Next, the level of detail. So how deep should you forecast? So we talk to customers all the time, and they're like, you know, hey. We we budget at that detailed level.

Right? We go down to the GL accounts, Maybe in certain areas like headcount or travel or software spend, we go down to vendor or specific trips, whatever it might be. But maybe for forecasting, we don't wanna do that. Right?

They often don't forecast that way just because it takes a lot of work and a lot of collaboration to get to that detail. Right? So but now with Qube, it's not as daunting. Right?

We already have all the budget in the system.

You can continue to plan at that detailed level. So if you were to ask me, I'd say, hey. Don't, like, go through extra steps to, you know, make a forecast process different than your budget, like bringing it up a level. You can, by all means, and I'll talk to that for those who want to plan at a higher level. But you have all the detail there in the database already. It's really easy to just keep planning at that level.

So you have the power to choose what level of detail you wanna plan at. Just know it's gonna be easier to do it at that detail level than maybe you have done that in the past.

Finally, how far out are we planning? Right? So when we're talking forecast, there's kinda traditionally a couple ways that we do it. First off, most customers we talk to are kinda doing a through the end of the fiscal calendar.

Right? Like a three plus nine, four plus eight, five plus seven. The example I'll be doing today is a seven plus five. You know, it gives your team a perspective on, hey.

What we're gonna finish in the year? It's pretty easy to manage and think about, conceptualize.

We have do have a number of customers who are, you know, executing a a more mature kinda FP and A level where they're doing rolling forecasting. Right? This becomes a lot easier to do with Qube if you've been thinking about this because, again, all this data is stored in the database. It makes it easier to actualize.

And, again, you know, what's great about this is it still provides you that through the end of the year fiscal forecast for the current year, but it's putting that lens on farther out as well. So it's gonna jump start that next budget cycle. Right? If we're starting our budget cycle in October, theoretically, if we're doing a rolling forecast, we have, you know, projected values out through September of next year already.

And it's also gonna help drive a better long term forecasting discipline for your team, but They're not necessarily focused on, hey. What am I gonna spend in the next three months because I have extra budget? They're thinking, no. What am I gonna spend the next twelve, eighteen, twenty four months, as I jump forward?

Another one I didn't list here, but a lot of customers might do through the end of the fiscal year and then through the end of the budget year. So you might be doing, like, a twenty two month forecast if you're updating that in February or March, whatever it might be. All of these are doable at Qube. Again, none of these are restricted by Qube.

We're, hopefully, making it easier across across your given path there.

Alright. So after you've thought about those things, and I'll bring some of those lessons in as we go forward, we're gonna talk about preparing for your cycle. Right? So this is where the cube come parts comes in, and this is where I'm gonna start showing off the platform if you haven't used cube for forecasting yet. So we're gonna do a few things coming up here. We're gonna create a new scenario so we can go do a forecast. We're gonna use cube to actualize our months for us so I don't have to do that manually in my templates.

I'm gonna show you how we can create input templates.

Again, with Qube, you can create your own really easily. You can continue to use your existing templates with that select functionality in your sidebar, or you can use some of our jump starter templates if you don't like yours and just wanna use something to get going. We have a big library of templates you can use as well. And then finally, we're gonna talk summary views so you can compare your different scenarios.

Right? So we'll jump in real quickly here and talk through scenarios in general. Right? So I always advocate, because Qube gives you unlimited scenarios, to use these as much as you can.

Right? So make use as many copies as it makes sense. You're gonna wanna purge them after a while because you don't want a thousand scenarios out there. But take advantage of that.

Save off a copy every week as you're going through your cycles, whatever it might be. And then we do have cubes AI smart forecast to draft new forecasts in a couple minutes for you as well as we go about this. Right? So kind of three distinct phases when creating forecast with Qube.

First is your very first forecast of the year. Right? So you're probably gonna make a copy of your budget that you created.

If we're in March, you're gonna actualize January and February, so you can do a two plus ten. And then we wanna always wanna save off that first copy for reference so you can see what's changed as you're going forward. So that's your very first forecast of the year. As you get going throughout the year, you want you don't have to do it this way. You can have specifically named forecast versions if you'd like. I always like to keep a live working forecast.

It could just be call forecast, it could be working forecast. But that way, people all your templates are already pointed to that. But then what you do is as you go through the year, you actualize the months, and then you save off copies at minimum each month once that's kinda rolled over. Right? So I can save off a copy of my six plus six. Now I can go back and reference it. But if you keep a live working forecast, you can always kinda keep that open and just actualize as year it goes along.

But, but, again, you can name it specifically six plus six before you get started.

But kind of a best practice I've seen out there, having that live working forecast. Unless, of course, you're you're doing three or four different plans like scenario a, b, c, d, then call those what makes sense as well. So that's kind of a traditional fiscal year forecast. If you are doing a rolling forecast, what's different here with Qube is I'd still keep that live rolling forecast.

I'd still actualize my months using Qube, using that merge scenarios button, which we'll go talk about in a second. But I would use my Qube AI to populate the newest forecast month. Right? So if we think about a rolling forecast, if we just roll over September, then theoretically, my new rolling forecast is October to September next year.

But all of a sudden, September of twenty five now showed up in my rolling forecast. So the big question is always, well, well, how do I get that first set of numbers in September twenty five? Right? You can manually go publish that in and do things like that, but I would just, like, Qube create it for me.

Like, tell Qube via the smart forecast, hey. Go generate September twenty five values based on my history or my current forecast or whatever it might be. So those are kind of the key concepts, and we'll walk through those right now.

We'll go manage our scenarios, go interact with that interface. So this will be hopefully helpful for those of you who haven't played around with this yet. Right? So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go look at our scenarios here.

And, again, key thing here is with q, you get as many scenarios as you could ask for. Right? Again, like I said, you probably don't want two hundred in here. Once you finalize scenarios, like, maybe my final budget, I can probably get rid of my old passes and things like that.

So key there, we're gonna go ahead and, you know, bring that in. But let's just say we're in the beginning of the new year. Like I said, we're gonna create that new first forecast. Again, what I'm probably gonna do is take my existing budget, and this is how you fire up a copy.

You just click over here on the side, and then there's this little copy button. Right? So when I click on that, it'll ask me what I wanna call it, and this is gonna be, like, my forecast. So I could call it, like, my working forecast or whatever I want.

Working forecast, whatever makes sense. I hit save. Qube makes an exact copy of my budget. Now it's called forecast.

And if we were in February or March, the next step you're gonna do really easy is that actualization process. Again, if you were working in spreadsheets, this is a huge pain. You have to go download your actuals for January and February, manually manipulate those, copy paste those, or link those into your files. With Keybears, you can do a easy click button here. We're gonna go up top and go to scenario merge.

And if you haven't played with this, very simple. I'm just gonna say, hey. My forecast, which I just made a copy of my budget, I'm gonna go through and actualize or use actuals to update my values. Right?

So if I was, you know, doing this for this current year, let's just say, I could say, hey. Give me a custom range, and I wanna go, you know, update January through, you know, September with actuals, and this would essentially create, like, a nine plus three. Right? I'd have nine months of actuals, three months of my budget or forecast, and I'm off and running.

But you just hit save. CUBE does all that data movement for you behind the scenes, hopefully, saving you all that time. If it was if you already had this going and it was, hey. Here's my live working forecast.

We just closed the books on September. Right? Then, of course, you can just come in and pick one individual a month, let you do that work. And now my live forecast that was a would that be an eight plus four, as soon as I click this, is now a nine plus three.

Right?

So really cool, really easy. And then, again, what I would advocate is as you go through the year, save off a copy of your live forecast. So every month, probably before I did that actualized via the scenario merge, I'm gonna click here, and then I'm gonna, you know, duplicate and make a copy and call this, you know, forecast twenty twenty four, you know, eight plus four, whatever it is. Right? Now I have that in queue. I can reference it. I can compare it against my new forecast at any point if I wanna see how things have changed throughout the year, for my plans.

Alright. So really cool there. The other thing I would do if I am saving those off is make sure you block them, which is just a little setting here on edits. It's right here, write protection.

That essentially freezes it. Right? So once I save off my eight plus four, I don't want anybody to change it. So I come in here and freeze it. That way, I can still view it and report on it and use it for scenario analysis and comparison.

But I'm not manually or I'm not worried about somebody coming in and changing numbers on that plan. Like, it's frozen. It should be locked into. Right? So a couple key features there again. Right? So take a copy of your old plan or your current plan, make a copy of it, actualize the periods, lock it down, save it off as you go throughout the year.

Now I mentioned this before.

Smart forecasting, again, we could use this to, like, precede our twenty twenty five budget if we're just starting with that. But in the case of, like, a rolling forecast, I could come in here and say, hey. I wanna go update my forecast, and I wanna go target specifically, you know, if we're doing my example from before, like a rolling twelve. Right? I wanna go populate September.

Come in here.

You could even go farther if you want to. There's no reason if you wanted hey. I mentioned this before in example. Hey.

I wanna do forecast your current year through the end of the next year. Great. You can just let cubes spit out some numbers. But then I wanna use actuals or in this case, I have a bunch of forecast data and planning already doing a rolling forecast.

So I can call out specifically, like, what time frames that I want to use to go generate the numbers for that that new month that I'm populating. Right? So now I can hit create smart forecast.

Keep it fire up those data points and populate that new month. So for those teams who are doing rolling forecast, this is a really easy way to create that first month of values or that next month of values, I should say.

And then you can react to it and change it all you want. But instead of manually going through all the work of, like, oh, let me just copy paste September or August and September, you could do that too. But you might as well use a little bit of history and things like that to dictate that if it makes sense.

Cool. Alright.

So, again, that's where we're gonna manage scenarios, create new ones, lock them down, merge our actuals in or actualize your templates.

Now I'm a come back here. And now let's talk through creating those templates. Right? So we've got all the data ready.

We've got a plan in the background in our database that's ready to go. Now we need to give our team access to it in a way that's, you know, makes sense. Right? So if we think back to some of those questions before, how we design and build our templates is gonna be dictated on those questions we answered before.

So the who is gonna drive this. Right? Is it more of a centralized plan versus am I distributing it out just like my budget? If it's more centralized, I might design my templates a little bit differently to maximize the intersections of data I'm trying to plan.

If it is distributed out to my team, maybe I'm just taking kind of the same budget template I used before and starting from it that one. Right? Same thing. How far out are you planning? Right? If I'm doing just a fiscal year end cycle, right, that's gonna dictate how many columns I bring in, versus rolling forecast. Obviously, I wanna bring at least twelve months out to the right, of that data I need to plan.

How much history to include?

Right? So we wanna bring in that history to allow your users to build good plans going out, and it helps to have the actual historical data that we've stored in Qube available to them to go ahead and drive that. And then finally, with Kube, again, we can use your existing templates. You just gotta highlight it and select, obviously, tweak some naming conventions and things like that to make sure it syncs up with Kube. But having the power to use your existing pump templates or build them from scratch or use Kube's starter templates, will really dictate a lot about how you wanna go about play. Right? So as we did last time, let's go through and and talk and show an example of building a template from scratch.

Again, we have great templates in our library. I'm sure you have great templates. But one of my favorite things about Qb is how easy it is to spin up a new planning template. So I'm gonna come in here and just go to a raw spreadsheet.

And what I'm gonna do is turn on my cubesat bar. Right?

Everything you might be doing today in terms of building reports and BBAs, all that same kind of thought process applies here. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna set up a template so our departments can plan their operating expenses.

And next week or next session we do, we'll do a lot of the more advanced template design, how to, like, do advanced formulas, things like that. So I'll stick kinda with the basics today in terms of a, you know, standard OPEX template.

But tune in next time because we'll go into some more advanced use cases. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna click on new. And, again, we're building a template from scratch.

The one we end up with will kinda look like some of the ones in our starter template library. So if you just wanna steal that, use it, and use the cube color scheme, great.

But what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and pull our accounts into the rows. Right? So we're gonna have our operating expense accounts running down the rows. You can see I have lots of metrics in here. But in this case, I'm just gonna pull in all of my operating expense accounts and the subtotals.

Next, I'm doing a forecast for twenty twenty four, and I believe it's gonna be a seven plus five because I think I only have, you know, sample data through July in here. So I wanna bring in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four.

And by default and if you haven't seen this yet, I'm sure you have if you're an ActiveCube user. We've rolled out a new selection, which is really cool, which is I can, you know, include everything when I click a parent. It'll grab all the children. So in this case, all the quarters and months underneath it.

I can pinpoint individual accounts or time periods or departments, whatever I might be. But one that comes in handy when you're doing, like, detailed analysis, especially if it's something like a SKU dimension or vendor dimension, is just, like, grab all the lowest levels, grow all the GL accounts. I'm not gonna do that in this case. But if you haven't seen it, that's really slick.

And we just released that. But what I'm gonna do is I don't need the quarters in here, so I'm just gonna turn those off. But it should keep all the detailed months here. So I just set that to individual, and I'm toggling off the quarters.

Lastly, I'm just gonna start with my actuals. I'll pull this one.

And I'll flip that to forecast as we go. I don't wanna exclude zeros.

None of the other dimensions are gonna factor in to start here, so I'm just gonna drop that in as a filter. But now I'm gonna use cube, and cube's gonna go ahead and build that template out for me. Right? So pretty straightforward.

Right? If I got this doesn't look nice yet for my team, but I have it kinda laid out. I've got the numbers, and we'll start to filter in. But I can come in here and just say, hey.

You You know what? We know we're gonna be forecasting. This is a seven plus five, so I'll pull in my forecast out here. And then we wanna do a couple things.

Because we're in a spreadsheet, we're spreadsheet native, we're gonna allow you to format and lay this out however you want. So if you wanna break up the years, throw in a blank column there. I'm just gonna throw in some blank spaces here to, you know, spread this out a little bit to make it a little more visually appealing for the team.

Right? And then I'll turn off grid lines.

Right? And then I am going to cheat here. I've done some pre formatting and whatnot. Actually, no. I need this one. One second here. Let me go to my other template.

And I'm gonna just steal the formatting applied elsewhere to this one.

Right? So, again, I cheated, but I'm showing all the color schemes, the formatting, the bolding, things like that that you want.

I can go ahead and bring that in. And then finally, the last thing I'm gonna do is just filter this down to, like, the respective intersection. So we're gonna pretend like we're building marketing template or something here. And I just need to account for the other dimensions in my model.

And in our advanced session, we'll talk about good ways you can bake these in. But I'm just gonna say, hey. Let's refresh this. It should bring it down to the marketing for the US.

It should populate my forecast values and drop all that data in. So, again, I cheated a little bit in terms of dropping some formatting on. But, again, you get to use whatever formatting you like, that your team is used to. You can throw your company logo in here, put in charts graphs, whatever it is to make this look the way you want to.

A couple quick pro tips here, though. I like to use formatting to highlight the areas where they're going to input values. Right? So in this case, all the white cells indicate to the user, hey.

You can go plan here if you want to.

Cube also puts that default blue font on here saying, hey. This is a live data intersection. You can go update this if you have the proper access.

But, again, some of the things to think about. Right? I brought in two years of history because I wanted to give my team twelve months of actuals to help drive their plan. Because maybe if they're, you know, generating their forecast values for the last five months, I might go do a quick Excel formula to say, hey.

Take the same period from last year, multiply it by five percent growth, and that's gonna spit out my new forecasted value. Right? The power of the spreadsheet is is at your fingertips. You can use whatever formulas, layouts, things like that that you want.

But, again, as quick as this, we set up a department level forecasting template for our OPEX, that we can go ahead and reuse.

So that being said, I also have an another version of this, and we'll talk about this when it comes to distribution as well. But here's kind of the same template. I've added a few, pieces of functionality, like some filters in that we'll talk about in our next session. I've added in, like, FTEs and headcount for my reference as well. But what you may want to do is send these templates out blank. And then if your teammates have the Qube sidebar, right, I can just hit fetch, and Qube will go ping the database, authenticate who they are, what their security is, and bring back the proper data intersections.

Right? Because now I can come in here and type in ten thousand. Right? I'm gonna go plan to add some rent expense, and I wanna go, you know, publish that data in.

And Qube is live grabbing that numb those numbers, pumping it into the database.

And I should be able to even see that in that new workbook I created. Let me just see that over here.

I should see my rent show up here. Right? Because cube is not, like, inherently connected to the spreadsheet anymore. Like, cube is the database pushing and pulling numbers from the spreadsheet.

So I could completely ditch this. It doesn't matter anymore. All the data lives in the database itself. So you remove a lot of risk if somebody's screwing something up in the template or whatever it might be because they're not deleting data points from q.

They're deleting type data points from the template and big deal. Right? If I go wipe this out, I that might have given me a heart attack before. Now I can just hit fetch.

Cube will drop those numbers right back in. So, again, if we think about the time savings and how to spin up those these cycles, right, cubes dropping all the numbers in my templates for me. It's collecting it out. We're also booking everything in that audit trail.

So if you do wanna, like, go see what happened, right, here I have that audit trail where on October ninth, I'm in central time, twelve thirty two central time. This team member let me say, Jim here. I just work for you. Update the rent expense for forecast for September for marketing.

It went from zero to ten thousand. So you do have that audit trail. You can access it from the web portal or directly from the sidebar via this little icon here. But a lot of power to save yourself time and be able to execute these cycles more quickly because Qube's managing the data.

It's actualizing it for you. It's dropping the numbers into your templates that you design or use, collecting them out so you don't have to.

So I just made that update, which is great. But how do I see the impact of that? Right? So that's where we're gonna come in and build some some summary and comparison views.

Right? So with the power of Qube, we're instantly summarizing all this data in the back end. So we wanna use Qube to drive that for us. So what this is gonna do, it's gonna allow us to track changes in real time.

Right? So as soon as I hit publish for that rent expense I added in, it pushed it back into the database.

It's gonna allow me to flag noteworthy changes. Right? Because I'm in a spreadsheet, whether it's Excel or Google Sheets, whatever it might be. I can use conditional formatting to highlight big variances and things like that so that the changes that should catch my attention catch it right away.

And it's gonna allow us to drive better what if analysis because I can instant if somebody asked me, Jim, what happens if we rent a new office? Right? I can instantly say it's gonna be, you know, compared to our old plan, it's gonna be this versus this. Right?

So I will pull that up real quickly. We'll go back to this template here. So I've already created this this view. And the key here is, like, there's no formulas linking tabs or workbooks together anymore.

I have my cube sidebar doing that. So I have my new forecast and comparing it against my prior. And now when I refresh this data, I can see instantly the impact of that change to marketing. Right?

Forty thousand dollar increase over my previous plan. Maybe if you're sitting high level overseeing the process, again, because queue makes it easier to distribute these templates out and run a more distributed cycle.

Be like, where did Jim make that update in marketing? Like, I used some conditional formatting. It's not huge yet, but I'm just curious.

Again, here I have another variance view, and I can refresh this, and I can see, okay, Jim booked that into the rent expense. You don't have to touch my template.

Doesn't matter to you anymore what I did in the spreadsheet. You can see the impact at this level immediately.

So always I always advocate that you build out these summary views and comparisons.

And sometimes I'll see customers that have, like, a report that shows their forecast trending throughout the year. So you might have, like, a column of two plus ten, three plus nine, four plus eight. So you can actually see your forecast change as it goes throughout the year. You can do a lot of cool stuff because Qube is storing all that data in here.

And you know what? Maybe I'll just kinda copy paste this. It might yell at me because I merged some scenarios. Right?

Maybe I'll just do budget. Right? So now I can compare this budget to my forecast, to my previous forecast. Right?

I probably wanna add some new, variance formulas and things like that in here. But now, you know, this is pulling in my budget. So I could see the trend between all these different scenarios very easily.

Cool. So that's kind of our spreadsheet summaries that's gonna help you be really tactical. Quick reminder, if you haven't engaged and started using dashboards yet, cube has great dashboard functionality.

You can also build these high level analysis views so you can compare, you know, budget versus forecast. I I think I have a couple of those different views here or actuals versus budget or actuals versus forecast.

Right? So we have a lot of good, like, webinar sessions we've done on this, good training, great, enablement resources. So if you haven't started doing dashboarding yet and you're looking to, go check out those resources, reach out to your customer success manager, and they'll help you, get directed to the right areas for that as well.

Alright.

So we've talked building our templates. We've talked building these summary views. Next is how do we get these out to the team? So if you saw a budget session, it's gonna be, you know, same kind of thought process here.

Right?

So a bunch of different methods.

Depends on your process, how you want to interact with your team. But, again, remember, you don't necessarily have to do all that data population and collection anymore. So no matter which route you choose, your manual work should be way less. Even if you are emailing out templates, you're not spending the forty hours building all the templates and populating them before you email them. It's a simple email. So what we see our customers doing is, you know, cube library, if you haven't seen this, this is a spot where you can go ahead and store your templates.

So here I have the library on the keep side sidebar here within the web portal. Right? So I have templates, like, hey. Maybe here's my department template or my monthly reporting book, whatever it might be.

It could be a link to a G sheet. It could be a link to an Excel online file. Could be just a spreadsheet in Excel, whatever makes sense there. So that's one avenue.

Use q. Store your files and, you know, links there.

If you do like to collaborate just using a shared network location, could be SharePoint, g drive, box, whatever it might be, You can continue to do that. You can just be like, hey. Go check out. We've got your template out here.

They open and it's blank. They hit fetch. All their numbers show up, and you're off and running. Really great for reports as well.

The good old standard, send out the email. That way you know it's in your inbox.

Can you can continue to attach links and Excel files, things like that there. Finally, I have seen customers use calendar invites. Like, hey. I put an invite on their calendar so they remember to do this within that as a link to the file, or the file itself, whatever makes sense. So lots of different distribution methods. The key here is you know, even if you do choose to email it out, you're not doing all that manual collection and, production time that you traditionally had to do for these cycles.

Alright.

I think we got a couple minutes left, and then we'll hit up the q and a. So last thing I wanna touch on is just some pro tips around scenario management.

So, again, we want to manage and track your progress with scenarios. So save off scenarios as much as you want throughout your cycles.

Right? I say it's best practice as you're going through a cycle, to save it off, you know, maybe weekly, something like that. Always keep that active working versions, but you can always save off distinct passes within a month as well. Like, hey.

What's my what if process or forecast my b one for this cycle? Whatever it might be. Really depends on your cycle timing, but take advantage of that because it's gonna give you a lot of visibility into the changes that are happening. So if somebody's asking you what happened between our previous plan and this one, you saw I just started showed it before.

I have pulled three scenarios into one view, and I could answer that while Jim increased rent in this between this and our last scenario. Okay. That's the difference there.

So, yeah, makes it easy to answer that what that's what changed type of, questions that you get. And then you get, what ifs are the natural extension to this. Right? So we've talked in mainly about, like, a forecasting cadence.

Right? Hey. Every month, we start forecasting the fifteenth. We close it on the twenty second, whatever it might be.

That's great. But, inevitably, a lot of folks on this call are probably being asked on an ad hoc basis, hey.

What if we do this? Right? What's the impact? Right? Or what if our close rate decreases or increases? What's that mean? How many more people can we hire next year in a best case, middle case, worst case scenario?

Use Qube for this. Right? Not everything has to be, like, a dedicated collaborative cycle. Sometimes it's just gonna be the finance folks on this call being tasked with answering a question.

Everything I just talked talked about applies for that what if scenario capability.

Same thing. Go to the scenario section in the web portal. Fire up a new scenario. That's an exact copy of this one.

Make those assumption changes in your model. Publish them in. Have that scenario view. You so you can compare your previous scenario versus your what if scenario or four what if scenarios so you can give those answers.

And, usually, if you're walking into a meeting and you're you know there's gonna be these types of questions, create a what if preemptively, basically. Like, have a what if scenario ready to go. So when somebody asks you that, what happens if we change our close rate? You can answer that in real time.

Okay. Give me three seconds. Go out to the file, publish that update into your what if, compare it. Well, that means we're gonna increase our sales by one million, and we need to hire, you know, two more reps or whatever it might be.

Right? So it gives you that real time impact. So take advantage of that as as well. Preemptively create what if scenarios when you're walking into some of those meetings where you know that those discussions are gonna happen.

That way you don't have to say, oh, I'll get back to you tomorrow after I rerun everything through the model. Right? You can do it, hopefully, in ten, twenty seconds there.

So and what what's great is our next session, we'll get into more, like, revenue based planning. I know I've been using kind of just a basic OPEX to kinda get the juices flowing for how this works, but we'll show us some of those what if type scenarios on, like, deeper levels of planning in that next session. But with that, I believe we're going to pivot into our any questions that we've had or that we wanna address as a group here.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Jim, and thank you everybody for submitting your questions. I know we have a few here.

So one of the first ones, as we bring in more people who haven't previously been involved in the forecasting process, what are some tips for enabling and sharing the value of forecasting exercises?

That's a a great question. If there are any folks, I'll I'll do a quick pitch. We do have a strategic finance pros Slack community, and that is a great question to put out to a bunch of finance leaders to get their take on it. You can also if you have any ideas for folks in the in the session here and wanna throw it in the chat, that would be good.

But I always think about it from take it from the lens of that team member. Right? What what does driving a better forecast mean for them? It means maybe it's gonna be easier for them to advocate for more headcount or spend.

Right? Because you're going to be, hey. We have a revenue forecast that's been updated. Right?

If you're just doing a budget once a year, it tends to get stale. People forget about it throughout the year unless it's, hey. I have money left to spend. But if you're like, hey.

We're doing a rolling forecast or a forecast and, you know, our sales has kinda taken off. We need more implementation folks to accommodate this demand.

Having that active collaboration is gonna make it easier for those team members. So kinda almost use it as a lens to teach them what you care about, not that it's everything is about you. But when people inevitably come to you with requests, you would want them to think about it from a forecasting, a finance perspective. So if you can start to instill that mindset in them and have them as an active part of the forecast, it's gonna make it easier for them to have those discussions with you because they've already thought about it from that broader picture perspective. So that's a quick take on that, but I would pitch that in our strategic finance community as well. Just see what some other finance leaders have have thought on that.

Awesome. Love the plug for the community.

Highly recommend you all sign up for that. We're gonna talk about that a little bit later as well.

Next question we have, can you export the audit trail?

That is a good question. I believe that is a product request at the moment. I don't know if anybody from the team has answered that in the chat.

Yeah. Yeah. Did. Oh, okay. Here he is.

I was gonna say it is, in the feedback portal, and it's something that our team at least our product team has acknowledged. So we're looking to get that out as soon as possible.

Yeah. It's pretty easy to go navigate and query, but that if you haven't, if somebody from the team can go drop the feedback portal in the chat. We do most of our road map for product is driven based on our customer feedback. So if you have thoughts, ideas, product improvements, you can drop them in there. You can also see what other customers have submitted, upload those because I'm part of a a call every couple every two weeks where we review that and just look at oh, we literally sort it by newest and also highest voted just to see how that folds into the road map. So quick plug there for that product feedback portal as well.

Yeah. Awesome. And I see Abby just dropped that link in the chat. So definitely go check that out if you're interested.

Another question we have here, what is the most efficient way to do this on a vendor level instead of high level amounts in the individual GL account?

So what we can get into that in our next session. Bert just blew in my window. Freaked me out.

I'm assuming you guys didn't hear that. But the key is, okay, do you want to do BBAs by vendor, which is, am I loading actuals in by vendor? Am I driving that type of analysis? If that's the case, the best way is to load in vendor as a dimension inside of your queue.

It's just easier to question and kinda discuss that setup, but could be added in after the fact. So if you do that, that allows you to plan by vendor and see actuals by vendor and build your templates by vendor. If you don't, we have a itemized planning capability, using Qube, which allows you to, like, collect detailed vendor level spend. It's just not based on actuals flowing in.

It's just based on the knowledge of the the human that's doing that planning. We'll cover that in our next session as well. I don't know if there's a link to, like, a help article on that. Abby, I'm putting you on the spot.

They could drop in as well, but it's essentially using the mark for attributes functionality that you see in the sidebar at the bottom.

That allows you to create itemized lists of vendor spend, travel spend, whatever it might be, and have cubes bring that in. And that, you don't have to make any changes to the database structure. That's just a native feature of the product that you can use to help with your planning.

Awesome.

Let's see a couple more take that out.

Email.

Okay. Next one. When you merge the actual scenario to the forecast scenario, what manual processes will be required if you're modeling the forecast at the vendor level? For example, when we have new vendor names hit the GL, we have to map each new vendor to a newly created vendor in queue in order to create the one to one match.

Yes.

I don't believe anything will change from a merging perspective because the second that vendor shows up or the day it shows up in your your source system, it should be flagged in cube to go address it. So I don't believe there's any actualization considerations there. I'm happy to take that one offline if there are that I'm not thinking about. But because Qube catches that, as soon as it shows up in actuals in your source system, it should be accounted for.

I guess the only thing that might play in is if you've mapped it after you've run your so if it showed up before you actualized, like, a day or two before you had not mapped it to where you wanted to go, you actualize. You could just reactionalize that period with the cube functionality. There's not, like, a flag or something that says, hey. You forgot to map this one.

But if you know about it, you can just reactionalize. It might not be a bad practice to just reactionalize, throughout the year as well, but you don't necessarily have to do that. There might be a nuance just around vendors in your process. But good question.

So another question that just came in. Could you provide some details on the underlying methodology used in cute smart forecasting?

Specifically, does it employ a simple linear regression model, or does it utilize more advanced techniques that account for seasonality trends and cyclical patterns in data?

It does take into account seasonality and trends and things like that. So it is running I think when we've set it up, we have multiple models that we could pick from when we established the smart forecasting, but it does look back across time. It's It's doing that time series analysis, to, you know, pick up seasonality, so on and so forth, as it generates that those new values. So you can know that.

But as you start to use it and you have feedback on the data models and things like that that we're using, feel free to submit those as well because we're always looking to improve that functionality based on, team member impact. The thing it doesn't do is it doesn't go and factor in external metrics. It's all based off of your data. So it's not gonna go look at inflation data or industry data right now.

Like, that's kind of a full scale data science project where you're probably employing a few consultants and things like that. It's gonna do it straightforward. Hey. Go run the time series, take into account seasonality, so on and so forth.

Cool. I see a question coming in through the chat. Is there a way to include the attribute details in a fetch? Meaning, can we pull the attributes that have been published from a new fetch?

Not in a fetch. They only manifest in a drill down.

So note that you can go click on a cell, drill down, see the details from attributes, published attributes.

We are product road map disclaimer, this isn't out yet, but it is one of our top projects is to make those types of details fetchable.

So, hopefully, in the next quarter or so here, we'll have some kind of table functionality that allows us to fetch that data in. So same thing. If you have insight or thoughts there, happy to hear feedback as we're designing and delivering that. Definitely wanna get customer feedback there. And Abby just posted that in the drill down.

She's on top of it. Love it.

Awesome. Well, I think that's all the questions that have come in unless anybody has anything last minute.

I think we're good to share the resources now. So thank you, Jim.

See.

Hold on one second. I think I see one more question coming in.

Oh, okay.

We're gonna handle that separately.

Yeah.

Alright.

And I'm sure you're gonna plug this in a second here, Alyssa, but we do have office hours tomorrow.

So if anybody wants to deep dive into these and, you know, talk through more specific examples, there we go. Second item. Feel free to sign up for that. We can dive into it together.

Definitely. Thanks for mentioning that, Jim. I'll actually start with the office hours. We did have some great questions come in today, and I know that because of the nature of this type of a platform, we can't go into as much detail as some of you may like.

So that's what tomorrow's for. So if you have additional questions and you wanna dive deeper, and get more specific answers, please feel free to sign up for the office hours. They're taking place at one PM eastern time tomorrow. So you can just click the link in the stack once we send it to you, or find it on our, customer workshops page on our website.

And so the first item here is to register for the remainder of our planning in cube series. As I mentioned earlier, this is session two, which was focused on forecasting. Session one was focused on budgeting, and our next session, which takes place on October twenty third, will be on advanced planning. So highly recommend you register for a third session if you haven't already, and also check out our first session, which will be included in the email sent to you after this.

Our third item here, start planning with scenarios in queue. We talked a lot about scenarios today. If you wanna dive deeper into that information, this is a great help center article that can help you out. So recommend checking that out. Our fourth item here is our newsletter, the finance fix. This is a newsletter written by our CEO, Christina Ross, who is also a three time former CFO. So she has lots of great insights into the world of finance, and she shares them via her newsletter.

So recommend signing up for that.

Next, Jim plugged this earlier, our strategic finance pro Slack community. The main benefit of this is that you get to connect with other finance professionals and ask them the questions that may not be so easily found on the Internet or on a website.

You get to share your advice, ask questions, find job opportunities, different types of content specifically for the community, and lots of other great stuff. So definitely recommend signing up for that. And lastly, Abby has been so kind as to drop a few links into our chat to our help center already.

But if you haven't checked it out, it is a great place filled with tons of information on how to navigate queue. So if you haven't already, highly recommend checking that out. And with that, I will stop sharing and just wanna say thank you all for attending today. Be sure to keep an eye on your inbox. And, Jim, any parting remarks before we let everyone know?

I saw Danny had a question. If you're asking if you're gonna do a webinar on dashboards, we have done that in the past, so we'll make sure at least Danny will get that in your hands so you can review it. But it's a good, you know, reminder for us of, hey. That could be a good session to to, you know, redo coming up here for, new customers, new team members, folks new to keep. So good good thought there, Danny. We'll make sure you get that one.

And whoever anybody else whoever anybody else anybody else wants a session or have questions, hey. Have you done this before? You can reach out to one of our team members, and we'll get some of that content in your hands as well. But, otherwise, thanks for the attention.

Alright.

Well, thank you everyone so much again. As mentioned before, keep an eye on your inbox for all the great resources we're gonna send your way. And we hope to see you on our next session on October twenty third. But until then, have a great day.

Planning in Cube Ep. 2: Forecasting

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