Video Transcription
Welcome to C cube live. Thank you for tuning in today. Before we get started, I'll just give a couple of quick housekeeping items.
So first is a q and a. If you are attending live and you have questions throughout the webinar, there will be some time at the end for us to address those. So feel free to drop them in the q and a below. And next is the recordings and slides.
So again, if you registered to attend this webinar, you will be receiving a copy of the recording, and the slides that we go through today. So you'll have access to those in your inbox following today's webinar. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Jim who is going to be taking us through our product tour today. So, Jim, I will hand things over to you.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Excited, everybody, for joining today and excited to walk you through the Qube platform.
I personally head up our solutions team. I've been here at Qube for three years. But before that, I spent over a decade in FP and A consulting, implementing a number of FP and A platforms that we consider kinda legacy platforms today, TM one, Adaptive, Hyperioness based, so on and so forth. So happy to jump in, explain to you a little bit of what Qube is, especially compared to to what the markets, you know, primarily had. So, Felicia, you wanna go to the next slide?
So where Qube fits in the market is we are the first spreadsheet native FP and A platform.
What that means is, traditionally, FP and A platforms try to move you out of spreadsheets into a web browser based experience, which seems really appealing when you start. Right? Like, all my pain comes from, like, trying to deal with these processes manually in spreadsheets.
But what turns out is you get into that web based platform and it turns out to be really rigid. It may or may not handle your nuanced complicated items that you need to tackle in your FBNA processes.
And what happens is there's actually a stat on this. About eighty six percent of customers who purchase an FBNA platform end up doing most, if not all, of their planning back in spreadsheets. So Qube's thought process is, hey. Let's embrace the spreadsheet, make that our end user interface, and keep finance teams where they wanna be without all that manual work that you do today. So if we go to the next slide, we'll kinda show you a theme for, you know, that old way.
Because you were moving into a web based platform, it required a lot of, new format or complexity encoding in the background, limited your formatting options, so on and so forth. With cubes approach, I'm gonna emphasize a few things as we go through today. You can see a big list here. The biggest things I'm gonna see you you're gonna take away during the session is Qube's gonna be really easy to use.
And that bottom point, it's gonna be flexible and scalable. When I talk to finance teams who are looking for these types of applications, they always say a couple things. Number one, I want something easy to use. And number two, my business is changing constantly.
I need it to be easy to change. Right? So I'm gonna highlight and emphasize those aspects as we go through this session today. And next, we'll show you a brief slide, I believe, showing the data flow of Qube.
So we're gonna show, hey. How do we connect into your core source systems? Right? The big deal in your processes if you're running them manually in spreadsheets today is getting data out, extracting it.
It's usually a data dump that you put in a tab. You got formulas everywhere. That goes away. You got that nice cube data engine in the middle of this flow diagram.
So we're gonna hook up to all your relevant source systems, your GL, your HRISs, maybe your CRMs, pull it into one central source of truth. And what's different with Qube is the right side of this diagram. Right? Because if you go look at another application, they're all gonna bring your source data in.
But on the right side, you don't see a web based interface for interacting with your data. We want you to stay in spreadsheets. We're just gonna automate everything. The next thing you'll see is the arrows flow both ways.
Right? So we're gonna allow you to publish updates to budgets and forecasts right from the friendly confines of your spreadsheets back into that data engine in the cloud.
So we'll take a quick look at the agenda, what we're gonna cover today, Alisa, if you jump to the next slide.
So where we're gonna start, we're gonna cover our core use cases, reporting and planning, and then we'll talk about administration in the middle.
But let's start off with ad hoc reporting. I mentioned CUBE is the easiest to use application I've ever seen. We're gonna start with building a report from scratch, then we'll move into automating your management reports that you use today. We'll talk visualizations and dashboards.
Then we'll open up the hood, show you how it works, how we connect to your data, how do you manage your hierarchies, give you a really good sense of comfort that you'll be able to run this thing on your own. And then finally, we'll wrap up with budgeting and forecasting and show you how CUBE can help you expedite those planning cycles.
So with that being said, I'm gonna jump in, and we are going to start with an ad hoc report example.
And as mentioned, we're gonna build a report from scratch. And I'm a show you a couple of things. Number one, I'm gonna bring in data from four different datasets into one report very quickly.
Right? I'm also gonna show you how we can format and layout that report as needed, and then we're gonna add some stuff on the fly to show you how flexible and easy this is to change. So let's jump in, and let's pretend that I've got a blank spreadsheet here. Well, it is a blank spreadsheet.
We don't have to pretend. But let's pretend Alyssa asks me for a report. She says, Jim, I need a report. I wanna see two years of data.
I wanna see twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four. I wanna see my operating expenses from NetSuite. I wanna see my, you know, revenue data coming in from, like, a system like a Salesforce. Right?
And then finally, I wanna see my Feet headcount.
And lastly, I wanna see mostly actual, but for whatever the remainder of twenty twenty four is, I wanna see budget. So that's four different datasets. And if Alyssa asked me for that today and I did not have Qube, that probably blows up my morning. I'm digging around, pulling data together, getting the same spots, the same layouts, the same formats.
With Qube, we're about to go do that in maybe twenty, thirty seconds. So let's get into it. We're gonna start by building the report. And my big takeaway for you here is it's gonna be really easy, really intuitive.
You should be thinking as I show this, hey. I can pick this up. I should be able to do this. And most of our customers learn the basics of this in about ten, fifteen minutes.
So I'm going ahead, and I'm turning on my Qube sidebar right in my spreadsheet.
And cube works with both Excel.
So whether you're an Excel shop, a GSheet shop, maybe you use both.
Everything I show you here in Excel will be the same in GSheets. On the back, I'll go to GSheets later. So I turn on my sheet, and I wanna build a new report. So, of course, I go click on new.
And, again, Alyssa asked me for report that's combining data from four different spots. So let's go ahead and drag in my accounts.
And what you can see here, this is my my structure for my database that we're gonna be accessing with Qube. So I can go ahead and pull in my accounts. What you'll see here is I have my kind of full normal three saver model. Maybe I have some revenue data, phone in, like, brands and things like that for my CRM, HR data, other operational metrics that I might care about.
But Alyssa asked me for from NetSuite my operating expenses. So I just click on that, and it'll grab everything underneath it. Perfect. And then she also wanted to see some of that data for my CRM, so I'll pull that in as well.
And then finally, I'll pull up my FTEs. So so easy. I dragged it. I dropped it.
I clicked.
Super easy there. I'm gonna pull my time periods in. Right? Alyssa asked me for twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four.
That's a lot of data. Two years by month. I can easily pull that in. And finally, I just wanna start let's pull in my actuals to get us going.
But all I've done so far, drag, drop, make a couple selections. Super easy, super intuitive. I'll add everything else down here as a filter because I don't need it right now. And this is where it gets cool.
I'm gonna hit fetch.
And that report that used to take me four hours to put together, Q went ahead and created that in about ten seconds if I wasn't yet in. Right? So I've got all that data that Alyssa asked for right in my spreadsheet right where I want it, right where I'm used to working with it. And the cool thing here is there's no coding.
There's no formulas, anything like that. Right? If I had put this together, I'm probably gonna have a bunch of b lookups, some if index matches. Right?
I don't have any of that headache anymore where I have to worry about things pointing to the right spot. Right? Q was dropping these numbers in. And if I accidentally delete it, no big deal.
I'll just tell Q, hey. Go get that data again. Right? Now it's gonna ping the database, pull back those values for me, and I'm off and running.
So this is great. Maybe Elvis and I work together every day. I just shoot this over her way, and I'm done. Took me twenty seconds.
I can move on to that next next task to get on with my morning. But if you're like me, I like to make things look a little bit more professional before I pass them along to maybe my superior colleagues or whatever. Right? So I'm gonna go in and start adjusting the format of this template and the layout.
The great thing here is because I'm in a spreadsheet, you already know how to do this. Right? You're not gonna have to sit through five eight hour days of report builder training. I can just come in here and insert a new blank row.
Right? I already know how to do this. Right? It's just taking advantage of my existing skill set.
You know what? I included the quarters. I could have untoggled those, but I'm lazy. So I'm just gonna delete those out manually.
Right? And maybe I'll insert a separator column for my, years, and I'll just go ahead and drop you know, iron those out. Finally, maybe I'll throw some bolding on. I could put on conditional formatting, underlining, bordering, whatever it is that you like in a spreadsheet.
But here's where Qube is cool.
We recognize that you want to make these adjustments. Other solutions I've used in the past, if I were to do this and hit refresh, it would wipe away all of this formatting and layout. Qube doesn't do that. Qube's just gonna go ahead, ping the database again, like, oh, it looks like Jim added some blank rows, made some changes. No big deal. I'm just gonna respect that and plop in the data that he wants in this report.
So I built the report. I've added some formatting, some layout changes. Maybe I wanna add some stuff to it. Right?
Let's say I wanna add a year to date total or maybe a trailing twelve month total in here. Super intuitive. Again, you don't even need to know, like, anything about cube. If I were to do this in a normal report, I would probably do this.
I'd probably say, okay. Give me June twenty three by TD and then June twenty three, t twelve m. Right?
If I didn't have Qube, I'm gonna huff and puff. Like, maybe here I write a formula. It'd be easy.
But here, I might have to go pull in now twenty twenty two to give me that trailing twelve month total. With cube, I don't have to do that. I just type in what I want. I hit fetch.
Now cubes are gonna go ping the database, and it's gonna aggregate the six months and the twelve months that I called out from a quick adjustment to this report adding in those column headers. So with Qube, it's really intuitive and really easy to pick this up and start building reports because everything is predicated on whatever I put in the rows and columns. Cube's gonna go find that and bring it into my report for me. Right?
There's no formula in here, anything like that. I just told it, give me the trailing twelve months if I wanted to do the trailing nineteen months. I don't know why I would ever do that, but I we've built in these suffixes to make it really easy for you. Now I'm gonna refresh this, and it's gonna pull in a nineteen month total.
Maybe that's relevant for you. I think it goes all the way up to ninety nine, based on whatever you wanna do. So really easy to make those adjustments, build a polish report. Maybe I'll even turn off grid lines so it looks a little more professional here.
Great.
Now I send this to Alyssa.
Alyssa doesn't even need a license with Qube because I'm in a spreadsheet, so I don't have to worry about, like, permission and things like that. If I don't want to, I'll talk about permission in a little while so you can lock this down. But Alyssa can just start viewing this report. If she does have a license, though, she can turn on Qube.
And Qube remembers this report, so I don't have to redo this work or Alyssa doesn't have to redo it. She just turns on that sidebar. It remembers, oh, I've seen this before. And maybe Alyssa's looking at this, and she's like, this four point one million in paid ads for the trailing nineteen months looks interesting.
I wanna go dig into that. Right? She doesn't have to go to NetSuite and pull up a query and try to figure out the last nineteen months. We have this awesome drill down button right here.
And when I click on drill down, what what's gonna do is it's gonna dig into paid ads and pull back the last nineteen months of data because that's what I asked for in this little query I just ran. So I got, you know, my nineteen periods here going back. And what's cool is it's gonna bring back kind of the core hierarchies I'm doing most of my modeling against, but it's also gonna bring back, some transactional fields. Right?
So it's gonna give me my memo field, my code, my date. I have three here. You'll probably have twenty. You want your journal entry type, posting date, vendor code, whatever it might be at that detailed level.
But this just pulled back, you know, almost three hundred rows of transactions, and then I can start to filter it into that if I want to. Like, let's go look at April twenty three for my Australia entity. Right? And now it's already trimmed that down, and I didn't have to do any work and log back into other systems.
All that data is right at my fingertips using that cubesat.
Fantastic. So we put together three datasets so far, and I mentioned before we want four. Right? I've got all my operating expense data.
I have my Salesforce data or CRM data, and I also have my FTE count from my payroll system. Great. Three different systems. But if I come out here to the right, I have mainly actuals, but starting in August, I don't have any data in this model yet.
But I do have budget. Right? That's another dataset that I have stored in my model. And And I wanna see budget for these last, you know, six, seven columns, whatever it might be.
All I have to do is type in the word budget and hit fetch. And now I'm gonna have a report showing me whatever that is. Twelve months of history, actuals from twenty twenty three, eight months of actuals or whatever it might or I don't have August. Seven months of actuals through July, and I'm showing budget data out here to the right.
And all that just changed the word to budget, and cube went and pinged the database and. Right? So incredibly easy.
Built the report, changed the layout to my preferences using my existing skill set and spreadsheets to make it look exactly the way I wanted, and then I went and added some different things to really make this a more robust report.
Now this was building it from scratch.
Chances are you and your team have a bunch of reports you already used today, and we hear this all the time. Like, Jim, this is great. I'm gonna create tons of new reports on the fly because I have to do that every week. But we have our reporting book.
It has twenty tabs in it. I just put it out every month. Can we automate that? And the answer with Qube is absolutely.
So we'll come here. I already have a BBA report here. Right? So I've got my actuals, my budget, my prior year.
This is already hooked up to Qube as you can see on the right. But let's pretend this is your BBA report. Right? It's in your colors.
It's got your logo on the top. It's got your spacing, your layout. It's what your your board likes, your executive team likes. What's great is Qube is not gonna make you change that.
We're not gonna make you start from scratch. I have the same report just not connected to Qube yet right here, and I've never seen another solution that can do this. We are gonna be able to hook up to your report and automate it in a couple seconds. The same way I built it from scratch in a couple seconds, we're gonna connect an existing report to Qube in a couple seconds.
And all I have to do, it's so easy, is highlight this section that's gonna have the data in it, and I even have some HR and Salesforce table down here as well, and I hit the select button. So when I hit select, we're gonna activate the cubes APIs to read the spreadsheet. Again, we're the only solution that has this. So I hit select, and cubes gonna auto recognize what's in this report.
Right? So it says, hey. I see scenario and time periods on the columns. I see my accounts in the rows.
And finally, I don't see department or entity or location or whatever it might be, so I'm just gonna drop it in here as a filter. Now I can hit fetch. What Keap's gonna do is it's gonna go find all those numbers and drop them in the report. So incredibly intuitive.
Now I can just go through every month, like, hey. We just updated July, and I can go fetch, and now it's gonna update to my July values. So once you get your existing reporting book set up and hooked up to Qube, it's just a factor of coming in every month, flipping the month, and hitting fetch, and you're done. We had a customer that used to take three days a month updating their financial statement reports.
Now it takes them about three minutes. Right? Because they just kinda double check things, update their numbers. So they're saving was that twenty four working hours every month, multiply that out, and that's just for a subsection of what they're using Qube for.
But you can do cool things, like, maybe make this year to date. Maybe I wanna go ahead and throw in here, like, a new column. Hey. What if I wanna put my full year forecast in here?
Right?
No training I have to go through. I literally type in the name of the scenario, and I want total twenty twenty four. Now I ping cube. Cube is going and pinging the database. It's gonna pull back my year to date through July values for these first two columns. And then finally, it's gonna go grab my total year forecast from the database as well and drop that in. Right?
Very little effort. Just put in what you want. Kube gives it to you. Super awesome from that perspective.
Now when you do bring your existing reports, chances everything is gonna match up perfectly, probably pretty low. That's why we have a, validate button in here. What this is gonna do is it's gonna double check your report to make sure we haven't missed anything, to make sure everything's lined up perfectly. So first step, we go ahead and connect your report.
Second step, we check for anything that cube doesn't recognize. So I'm gonna click on this validate button here on the side, and it shows me five items that I don't recognize. Right? So I'll start with the bottom here, I eleven, j eleven.
These are just variance columns. These are not the formulas that are giving me a headache. Right? D minus f.
And in fact, it might be different down here. Like, here I have f minus e because I wanna show my variance differently based on where I'm at in my financial statement. So I can ignore those. C seventy two and eighty one down here.
These are just kind of decorative headers for lack of better term. Right? So those aren't supposed supposed to pull back data, so I can ignore those. But I see here in line sixteen, it cube does not know what disk is.
No big deal. I just click on this button, and I start to search. And I can see, oh, in cube, it's called discount.
Here, it's called disk. Let's just update that. So I'm gonna hit update. It changes this name to discount.
Now I'm all good. I'll hit fetch. It's gonna pull in that number, but my total here is not going to change. That's because I'm not relying on some formulas anymore.
Right? In fact, there's no formulas here anywhere pulling back data.
Cube is calculated, in this case, revenue, and it's pulling back whatever numbers I need based on how we're calculating in that back in the back end of the database. So I'm gonna show you that in a second, how we structure that data, what that looks like in the back end. But, again, just to recap here real quick, tons of value. We're gonna be able to take your existing reporting book, connect Qubed right to it, and give you tons of quick time to value because we're gonna automate that reporting book maybe in that first day or live with your project as we're working with you.
And, actually, you're gonna be doing most of this work because it's as easy as it looks. You highlight it. You double check the naming conventions. You hit fetch, and you're up and running.
Last thing to show here before I go on that back end is I have a bunch of reports in this book. I don't have to go one by one and refresh them if I don't want to. I can say, hey. Let's grab everything.
In this case, I have eight reports in this workbook. Let's refresh all eight of them. Right? So in one click, I can update my entire reporting package based on that most recent data that we've loaded in the queue.
Fantastic.
Alright. So let's go look in that back end. Right? I've talked about the ease of use, the flexibility.
You know, obviously, getting the right data in is a super critical portion of a solution like this. Right? So what I'm gonna come in here, this is our cube web portal. This This is where you're gonna manage the structure of your model, your hierarchies, your formulas.
You'll manage your data flow into the system from your various sources. And what I'm gonna start with is talking about those different business hierarchies. We call them dimensions inside of Qube, but these dimensions or hierarchies will match exactly what your business needs. Right?
So here I have the statement of financial activities for a a nonprofit.
Right? So I've got all the different accounts up here in my income section where I'm pulling in grants, whatever it might be. Here I have my expenses, my different types of expenses. So it's your chart of accounts.
We're not gonna force you into ours. Right? If you have concepts of, like, cost centers or departments or profit centers, whatever it might be, we can build that in. We'll come talk back and talk about budgets and forecasts in a little bit here.
Obviously, all my time periods. If you're on a non calendar fiscal year, we can match that as well. But any other kind of specific hierarchies that your team slices and dices by, we will build that in here as well. So in this sample, organization, I've got locations.
I've organized them in the east, north, south, and west. I have classes. Right? These are, like, different kinds of programs and things like that that I might be working with.
And finally, different funding sources like my grants and different funds. But, again, whatever your accounting structure is that you slice and dice by, we will build that into our platform so you can do that proper reporting that you need. Cool. So really cool from that perspective.
The other thing is for each of these, you have that kind of primary hierarchy. So in this case, we have clinics, and we organize them by their region. Right? East, west, north, south.
Right? But maybe I wanna organize those differently. Right? Maybe I group Cedarville, Elmwood, Bluewater, and Goldenfield.
Maybe it's by manager. Maybe it's by a specific type of location I have, whatever it might be. Right? So I can come in here and add what we call a tag.
This is gonna be an alternate roll up where I can start to group that data. So maybe, I'll just do Alyssa's, Alyssa's, locations. Right? Maybe she oversees a subset of our locations, and they don't fit cleanly in this hierarchy.
Right? Maybe so I'll grab a handful of them, and we'll start with that. Right? So she oversees these four locations.
Boom. I can save that. Now Qubia is just recalculating that quickly. And now I can pull Alyssa's locations into one of my reports, and it'll sum up those four locations outside of that normal geographic hierarchy that I used today.
Awesome. So that covers kind of our hierarchies. That's our first step. Our second step is we're going to go ahead and connect into your source systems to pull in relevant data.
So it's usually always gonna be your financial data, but maybe it's that CRM data, HRIS data, whatever it might be. And we'll just use Sage as our example today. So you can schedule those imports. So let's just say five AM every morning before the team gets in the office.
Let's go ahead and load the freshest actuals into queue. Fantastic. If it's month end close, you can also fire off on demand imports as well. So if you're closing the books and you wanna refresh the data in the queue seven, eight times throughout the day so you can see those reports refreshed, you can go crazy and import that data as many times as you want.
The other piece this is gonna do is it's going to check your source system so you're not missing anything. So if a new account gets added, a new location, a new apartment, that doesn't slip past you. It doesn't fall through the cracks. So I can click on this import button here, and Qube's gonna resync up with this database.
So in this case, it's connected with Sage, and it's saying, hey. Is there anything new? And I see, yes. There are three new items that somebody from the accounting team maybe added.
So I'm gonna go map those into Qube to make sure I don't miss them and also to make sure they're going where I want them to go. Right? So on the left side is my chart of accounts from my source system, in this case, Sage. On the right is how I'm mapping it into Qube, and you can see I've already mapped most of these in.
So let's just hide the map ones, and it looks like Alyssa added a new cash account. Right?
No big deal. Qube catches it for me, and I can go ahead and add it right into Qube to make sure it goes where I want. Or if I'm actually consolidating from multiple systems and doing more of a consolidated view, I could map this into an existing account if I need to. So I could send this ten two five o to one hundred thousand here, cash and equivalents, and I'm done. So make sure everything is lined up. We're not missing anything.
No longer are you gonna have your reports where you miss that account and it screws everything up and you have to go sweep through and update all your formulas. Cube's managing all this mapping, this the integrity between the two systems, and you're off and running.
So this is fantastic because we're gonna have all those different connections. It's gonna be flowing into that database, that central source of truth for you, and you can manage it from that perspective.
Fantastic.
So, again, this is our web portal.
Hopefully, it looks really intuitive, really easy to use to be able to manage this, make changes, make sure your data's flowing in. We're not missing anything.
I'm gonna jump into planning next to show you how we can update a budget or a forecast when you're working with your team.
And we're gonna start off by talking about scenarios really quick. So when you're doing planning, having a lots of scenarios becomes really important and really powerful.
I think back to when COVID kicked off, like, to forget those days, but I was working with customers that were running fifty different scenarios that first March and April after things went in because there are so many unknowns. And their budget was kinda worthless at that point because so much in the world had changed in a very short amount of time. With q, we're gonna give you unlimited scenarios. You can have as many budgets, forecast, rolling forecast, long range plans as you and your team need.
There's a couple really cool aspects to point out here that are gonna help you manage that process really well. Number one, you can lock down your scenarios. Right? At this point, we're almost getting close to being done.
We're in September of twenty twenty four, whoever's watching this later on. Nobody should be changing my twenty twenty four budget. Right? That's frozen.
That's locked in. So I've locked that down. It's a quick easy toggle on the scenario. I can flip this here, and that will lock it down for me.
I'm good to go. But But if I'm about to fire up a new scenario, right, I wanna run a new what if or we're just firing up a new budget cycle or forecast cycle, and most of the time, I'm gonna be using my existing scenarios as that starting point. So if I wanna go make a new forecast, I can click on my existing forecast and click this button here. And I'll go ahead and put copy.
I'll call it whatever I want, and now I have a fresh new scenario. I don't need seventeen Excel files or g sheets floating around anymore for all my different scenarios. Keeps managing all this data in the back end, so it's really easy to pull into a report where I need.
Next, usually a huge pain, especially if you're doing regular forecasting to actualize your plans. This is one of the big reasons, like, people just do a budget and aren't regularly reforecasting because it's so painful to, like, update all the data. No longer with Qube. I have this really nice scenario merge button, and what this is gonna do is it's gonna actualize my forecast for me.
So now I can say, hey. Let's update my forecast with actuals, and let's just say we just loaded in August data. I can come in and say August. Right?
With the three, four clicks of the the mouse, I can actualize my entire plan. That would take me hours, if not days, for some customers to go do that. With a couple clicks, I do it right here in queue.
Finally, our first foray into AI is really around smart forecasting. A lot of platforms are trying to draw fancy chat bots and things like that that aren't incredibly useful. Here with Qube, we asked our customers, hey. What would be the most impactful use case for you?
And we got some of the feedback. Hey. It'd be great if Qube could create a forecast for me. And our customers are using that kind of from two perspectives.
They might use it as a starting point for their new plan. Like, hey. What's the computer think I'm gonna do next year? I'll use that as my jumping off point, and then we'll let my team go and make updates based on their knowledge.
Or your team creates a plan and then you wanna sweep through and compare it to that computer generated plan just to see if there's anything that's wildly off, and maybe that's something you spend some time digging into a little bit. So really cool, the smart forecasting functionality being able to use that. But let's go in. Let's we are talking about building a plan.
Let's go update a plan. Right? So I'm gonna go into my spreadsheet here. And what's great is as I start to collaborate with my team, maybe I wanna get a plan update to our our our plan from our marketing team.
They can come in here. I send them this template, and they give me a heads up they've started working on. Now when you as a finance team are kind of watching over the process, you wanna see things that are happening, what kind of updates are flowing through, you're probably gonna have some screens like this where you can see the changes that people are making in real time. Right?
So I can delete all this data out. There's no formulas or anything like that I need to worry about. There's no coding in here. But I can hit fetch, and I can see that my new forecast here in column h is identical to the previous one because that's because I just created a new one.
So, hopefully, they should match.
But now as my team starts to go in and make updates, I should be able to compare it. Hey. What's the difference between our new plan and our previous plan? Right?
So I'll come here. And when you think about a planning process in a spreadsheet, whether it's Excel or GSheets, usually really painful in two spots. Really time consuming. Number one, prepping your files so your key team can actually go do the planning and then collecting that data out.
So we're gonna show you how easy it is to go ahead and pull the data into the spreadsheet. Right? I can look at this here. I've got kind of my operating expenses.
I have twenty twenty three for reference. I've got six months of actuals, and I'm doing a six plus six forecast.
But me as the finance team, I don't have to do a lick of work to get these numbers in here. All I do is hit fetch, and cubes gonna go ahead and bring all that data in. It's gonna bring my twenty twenty three actuals in. It's gonna be my first six months of actuals into this template, and then it's gonna bring my six months of plan in. So that all that prep time that you normally go through, whether it's creating a plan, actualizing a plan, or just prepping your templates, Qube takes all that work off your plate, and we're handling that via that Qube data engine.
Now I'm showing Excel here. Maybe your team uses Google Sheets. I'll jump into Google Sheets because I've got that set up here as well. Right?
So I'll come up here. Here's a Google Sheet. You'll notice the cube sidebar. Only difference is it's called an extension in Google Sheets, but every single click, every single button is identical between the two interfaces.
And let's just come in here and let's say, hey. We're gonna start renting some office space. So I'm the head of marketing. I want to update my plan to include expense for office space so I can key in ten thousand dollars here starting September, and we're gonna drag that across every month.
Now, normally, you as a finance team member have to get this template somehow. You have to feed this into your model manually. You're copy, paste, and data. You're using formulas.
You don't have to do that anymore. Qube handles all that with this simple publish button. So what CUBE is doing when I hit publish as an end user is it's sweeping through this input template, in this case, in GSheets, and it's finding any updates. And what it's doing is sending those into our database in the cloud.
Right? So we're bringing in actual data from our source systems, but we're also collecting budget and forecast data shooting into the cloud. And you could see here I've made four updates. I'll pop down down here to Excel because that might be where you're hanging out.
And, obviously, there's no connection between GSheets and Excel, so I don't have to worry about, like, a formula or anything like that. I just hit fetch, and boom. I can see that Jim in marketing, who's working in GSheets, just made forty thousand dollars worth of updates. I didn't have to do anything.
I can see that right away aggregated to a level of detail where I can compare and contrast it against my previous scenario. Again, that's a huge undertaking if you're manually running those processes.
And even better, you're like, okay. I see Jim updated forty thousand dollars. You could go to my template to see where I made that change, or you could have just, like, another variance view. Here, it's by account.
You can hit fetch and be like, where Jim make that update? Oh, I can see Jim updated rent expense here by forty thousand. Right? So really cool.
Cube is gathering those inputs, publish them into the database. Now I can see the impact of those changes, and we do have a full audit trail. So if I wanted to see, like, where that change came from, let's come here. Right here, September twentieth at twelve thirty three central time.
I work for Qube, but this would say Jim here. Jim updated the rent expense for forecast for September for marketing. It went from zero to ten thousand. Where was Jim?
He was in Google Sheets in this file, this tab. So we do track every single change. So So if Alyssa was trying to tell me she didn't make that update, I'd be like, yes. You did.
September twentieth at twelve thirty three central time. You were getting this Google Sheet on this tab, and you updated this number. It was this. Now it's this.
Gotcha. Right? Well, that might not be the intention you have, but it's good to have that transparency and auditability with this platform to track those changes.
I'll show you one more example from planning, and then we'll wrap up with some visualizations, And then we'll have time for, questions for anybody who's interested there. So I'm gonna come back down to our template, and this is Excel. I actually will refresh this here, and I should see that rent show up that I added up in Google Sheets. There it is. Again, no formulas, anything like that. But, usually, the next question we get here is, hey. This is great.
Can I use formulas, and can I go deeper? So the answer to the both of those is yes. Right? So because I'm in a spreadsheet, you have the power of the spreadsheet at your fingertips.
So if I wanna do, like, an average of the last three months for this cell, great. I can go ahead, run that through. I can go ahead and hit publish, and I'm good to go. Right?
So it keeps collected that based on that trailing three month average I used, and I don't have to learn anything new. That's just a spreadsheet formula. So cool. You can use all the formulas you want to help drive your plans, making you super flexible, making you super scalable because as something comes up, you already know how to do it.
You can use Excel or G Sheets to your advantage and use those formulas.
The next thing is this is great, but I also go deeper. Right? Like, travel expenses. Maybe I collect line item detail because I want my team to be really thoughtful about how they're gonna spend their travel budget.
Right? So you can set up a separate tab or do it right in the other tab. I've added it here because I wanna collect a bunch of info about what types of trips and travel we might have. So you can see here I've got, like, six different columns.
I'm up here in Wisconsin. Maybe the team's gonna come visit me for a conference. So I'm gonna plug that in. We're adding this into our forecast for August here, and we're gonna boost this up to three hundred fifty k.
Right? But what's cool is in this template, I just have this pointed to the travel account. Right? I hid this for real estate purposes on the screen.
But I've told cube, hey. I wanna collect all this info via this button here, the set attributes.
Keeps gonna go ahead and say, hey. Everything that gets entered between columns g and l, let's grab that data with the numbers. Right? So now I'm gonna go ahead and hit publish down here. And what Keep is doing is grabbing the line item detail for this travel account, also all the, notes and commentary.
And if I come back to this screen over here and hit fetch, I can see here I've got about five k, four k every month.
But now I can see I've got three hundred sixty five k in August. And if you're the finance team looking at this, you know, like, what in the world is Jim doing in August?
You could try and dig up my template. You could try and call me. Or if you have queue, you can just click on drill down, and Keep's gonna pull up all that line item detail. So you do not have to go dig through my template.
You can be like, alright. And this looks like kinda normal travel up here, but what is this three hundred fifty k in August for a conference in Wisconsin? The last time I talked to Jim, that was thirty thousand. Now it's three hundred fifty thousand.
I got a typo in there. They had extra zero, whatever it is. But you already have the discrepancy. Now you can just come to me and ask about it.
You're not, like, having a runaround conversation. Right? You get access to that really quickly.
Alright. So that's our planning. Right? So just to recap here, we're gonna save your team tons of time and allow you to run way more cycles because you're not gonna be manually dropping all these numbers into these templates anymore.
Kube's gonna do it for you. Gonna give you the flexibility to model and plan however you want. And then finally, Kube's gonna collect those values out and push them into the database, saving you all that aggregation and collection time. And you're gonna be a much happier planner.
You're gonna be planning more often. That's probably one of the biggest things. Like, we have customers that go from just budgeting to now doing quarterly reforecasting or monthly reforecasting because it's not so daunting to spin up these cycles and close them down. Right?
You can just do that with a couple clicks of a button. So all this is great. We've collected all this data. We showed some initial reports, but what we wanna kinda wrap up with is, hey.
It'd be great if we could visualize this. And when I think about visualizations, especially with finance, there's two core use cases. Everything's dashboards and sizzle and things like that. We got that a plenty.
I'll show that in a second. But I like to sharp start with the more meat potatoes thing, which is vortex. Right? Spreadsheet visuals, things like that.
Every customer I work with is usually doing those types of visuals. And if I just come back to one of my, reports here where I was kinda playing around and I'll go to my ad hoc one, let's say we just wanna add a little chart down here at the bottom, and I'll pop over to this range. And the the big thing note here is super easy, super intuitive. If I wanted to build a chart showing my revenue by market, right, I'm just typing in east, west, and central.
I could use cube to cube to build this for me, but I'm just gonna go ahead and do it this way. Right? I want two quarters. I want my markets.
And I can tell cube, hey. Go find this data for me. Right? I wanna go add a new section to this report.
So I can click add. I can tell cube to go read this.
Qube goes and reads it. It sees my quarters. It sees my markets.
Fetch. Here comes my data. And then finally, let's go insert a chart. Right? This might have taken me twenty, thirty minutes to pull this together at the quarterly level rolling up all my revenue.
I just did in ten, fifteen seconds. You can go back and check if that's close close to ten, fifteen seconds, put together this chart. So really easy to create these insights, add them into your decks. And the natural extension of this is most of our customers have something like this, which is a workbook with a bunch of visuals they reuse every month, and then a table that's connected to Qube.
Right? So I can clear out all this data. You can see up here cube is looking at this range or this table, d forty four through t sixty three, which is basically everything you see here. And now every month, I can just come in and flip this to, let's just say, July of twenty four.
I can hit fetch. Cube's pinging the database. It's dropping all the numbers in the table, populating all those visuals. I have those linked into my PowerPoint, and I was talking to one customer.
He used to spend nine, ten hours a month putting together their board decks. Now they spend twenty minutes. Right? They still double check the numbers.
They update the narratives where they need to. They can fire up new charts to add in for more context where it makes sense. But they're saving a day a month of work time on their board deck alone, not counting everything else they're doing with q. So that's kind of visual one, that board deck spreadsheet visuals that pretty much all of our customers do in day in, day out.
But if you wanna empower your users, if you wanna give them access to more data so they don't have to ping you all the time, that's where our dashboards come in as well. Right? You can give them self serve around the reports I was just showing you, but everybody loves a good dashboard because you can interact with it. You can filter.
You can drill down, and you got nice, like, insightful visuals that can really help you highlight different things. Right? So we got bunch of different flavors of visuals in here that you can play around with. You can filter the data down by whatever you need.
Right here, if I wanna go look at the last twelve months, great. I can go do that. If I wanna hover above a chart to get more details, I can do that. If I wanna go dig into details, I can, you know, generate some automatic insights based on the data or just break it down by something that's important to me.
And lastly, you can have as many of these dashboards as as you'd like. Right? So I can have maybe an executive view, a department head view, territory view, a finance team view. Right?
You can have dashboards tailored for specific audiences. We do not limit you on dashboards at all. You're an organization that already has a dashboarding solution with Power BI, Tableau, we've made it really easy for Qube to play with those systems so you can hook those right up to Qube to visualize your budget and forecast data as you see fit.
Awesome.
Well, real quick, wanna recap what we just covered. Right? We walked through reporting.
We talked about ad hoc. I showed you right away how easy and flexible it is to give yourself access to those insights to spin up a new report you might need, saving you tons of time. We also showed you how we can just connect Qube right to your existing workbooks to automate all that manual work out of your month. Right?
You just hit hit one button. You can update entire twenty tab workbook in one click. We've walked through the back end. Hopefully, it looked really intuitive in terms of how we structure your data, how we connect to your source systems and load your actuals and to manage that data in one central source of truth.
And then finally, we talk planning. Right? A lot of teams aren't planning as often as they want to just because it's so daunting to run those cycles. Now with Qube, we're gonna help populate all the data into your templates.
Those templates are gonna be in an environment that are super comfortable for your users. You're not sending them some brand new website they have to go navigate. It's a spreadsheet. They're used to doing it.
You're just saving yourself all the manual time prepping it. And then at the end of the process, collecting it. Right? They hit one button, gathers all their inputs and updates.
You can see the impact in real time, compare as many scenarios as you want. And then finally, visualizations giving you insights, whether it's board decks or more interactive visualization experience.
So I'll, open it up for, I think is there a question slide? Maybe Alice, I'll have you come off mute and walk through some resources we have here.
Thank you. Yeah. That was great. Before we dive into the resources, I do have a couple of questions for you.
Oh, perfect. Yeah.
Through a. But you could leave the resources up there for now or take them down. It's time to Alright. So first question for you. Is it typical to work with a consultant to onboard Qube?
Yeah. So we do not require any third party consultants. Everything is handled in house. And what's great with Qube, we you'll be working with Qube resources, and there's kind of a couple primary folks who work with you.
I have an implementation manager who's dedicated to getting all your structure set up, building out that connection. You're not left to do that on your own. We're gonna make sure everything ties out before you start playing with it, building your reports. And then we have a dedicated customer success team who's gonna make sure you're successful.
Right? So they're gonna help train you if you are doing something for the first time and need a hand, like, hey. I'm adding somebody in security or taking them out. What do I do?
We can cover that off, with you and train you on that. By the way, we do have all the security permissions you might need and SOC two data compliance to make sure all your data is secure.
So, no, you we're not working with third party consulting firms where you're paying by the hour. It's a simple process, you know, in terms of getting you implemented using all of our team members.
Great. Next, I saw you have a couple of different cube plans. Which one are you using in this demo?
That's a good question. All the plans that you might have, are gonna be the same now. We've kind of consolidated those and to make it, you know, custom. Most of it's just based on how many users and things like that. So everything I saw today, you will get with the Qube platform that you'd be signing up for.
Great.
Couple more. Next one. If multiple users are using the platform at the same time, is this gonna affect real time data entry?
No. So that's what's great. There's no conflicts.
The only thing is if Alyssa and I were trying to update the same exact number, which rarely happens, but, whoever clicked publish last would win, but that's pretty much how every solution works in this space. But, otherwise, if Alyssa's updating the accounting, team's platform and I'm updating the marketing team's template, we have no issues, working on that at the same time. That's usually how budget cycles are going. Right? Everybody waits till the last minute and are making changes, so there's, you know, zero conflicts there from that perspective.
Awesome. And last question, kind of piggybacking off of that one, how many users can use Qube at the same time?
There is no practical limit.
I am not sure what our actual record is for number of users at one time. But especially I mean, if you think about it, there's always, like, time windows where people are in their off all the time. Right? Like, whether it's month end close, you got a bunch of finance people being reports and things like that, or budget and forecast cycles. Like I mentioned, everybody's waiting till the last minute and doing it at the same time. So we have no concerns about number of users in there at the same time.
In fact, we've built it with that in mind knowing how these teams operate where everybody's usually kinda working on things at the same time.
Definitely. Yeah. So there's room for everybody. That's great. Well, thank you so much, Jim. I appreciate answering these questions, and great job with the demo. Before we let you go, I'm just gonna bring those resources up one more time.
Alright. So our first one, if you liked what you saw today but wanna go a little bit more in-depth and have some specific questions that we didn't quite answer, feel free to request a custom cube demo. You can just click that link right there.
Next is our biweekly newsletter, the finance fix. This is written by our founder and CEO, Christina Ross, who also happens to be a three time former CFO. So she really knows her stuff and has a lot of great contacts in the space who will be featured in the newsletter often. So if you're in the mood for tips, tricks, just wanna know what's going on in the finance space, this is a great resource for you.
So I highly recommend you checking that out. And lastly is our strategic finance pros Slack community. This is meant for people like you, people in finance, people who wanna connect with other people in finance. If you're looking for tips, advice, job opportunities, interested in networking, or wanna get your eyes on some specific content meant especially for this community, this is another great resource for you.
So I highly recommend signing up for that.
And with that, I think that is it for today. So thank you everyone so much, and thank you, Jim.
I hope you have a great rest of your day.
You too. Thanks, everybody.
Bye.
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