See Cube Live: Streamlined FP&A for Real Estate

Video Transcription

welcome to C cube live.

Before we get started, I'm just gonna go over a couple of quick housekeeping items. So first is the live q and a. If there are any questions, you can throw them in the q and a, and we'll be sure to answer them at the end. And then recording and slides, everything that is being said today is being recorded, and we will send the recording as well as the slides in an email following product tour. So without further ado, our speaker for today is Taylor, and she is going to walk you through, all of the different features of Qube for real estate.

So, Taylor, I will throw it over to you.

Awesome. Thanks, Alyssa. Yeah. So I'll give a quick introduction to myself here today. My name is Taylor, solutions architect here at Qube.

I've been here for about two years, but I come from a background of FP and a consulting in the past, working with lots of more kind of legacy generation one and two solutions like Hyperion s space, t m one and one stream. I recognize the power and robustness of all of those platforms was great, but realized that they always came at a cost of flexibility and a cost of ownership for my clients. And that's what really carried me over here to working at CUBE. Just seeing this as being that next wave of FP and A really drove me to, you you know, work with this platform to help showcase that flexibility and that ease of use.

So that's really what we'll be digging into here today during this webinar.

So our agenda for the webinar here today, we're gonna start with an introduction to Qube, kind of covering the the landscape of the FP and A market and where Qube sits within that. And then we'll dive into the live demo portion after that, where we're gonna take a look at lots of different use cases, giving a high level overview of all the functionality with cube and then more of a real estate specific model. And then as Alyssa mentioned, we'll reserve some time for q and a at the end and kind of providing different resources that you can access after this webinar.

Next slide there.

Perfect. So to kinda describe Qube at a high level, Qube is really the first spreadsheet native FP and A platform out on the market.

What I mean by this is that in a lot of those more kind of legacy solutions that I used to implement in the past, their methodology for kind of tackling FP and A was to take their customers out of their existing reports, workbooks, and models that they had in Excel or Google Sheets and force them to work within some kind of rigid predefined modular site in the web.

And that can be great in the first six months or so to using those types of platforms. There's a lot of robustness in those types of systems, but the challenge is if something breaks in a formula or you want to start expanding your use cases or building new reports and models, it's really difficult to do that in those more rigid web facing tools because they have a lot of convoluted, back end code. There's a lot to learn in terms of administrating those types of systems, and you're ultimately pretty reliant on consultants to do a lot of that work for you.

Kube takes a very different approach where we meet our customers where they are at and allow them to work with all of their data directly in a spreadsheet.

So we are still storing your data in a cloud hosted system, pulling in data from multiple data sources to keep that kind of robustness of a platform. But that ultimate end user experience is gonna feel very familiar and very intuitive because you're going to be reporting on your data in spreadsheets, as well as running your planning, budgeting, and forecasting cycles directly where you're already comfortable using your models.

Next slide here, Alyssa.

So the old way that some other FP and A solutions used to kind of tackle this spreadsheet facing model really required a lot of outdated technology. Oftentimes, their method of linking their back end cloud hosted databases to a spreadsheet required more complex formulas, code, proprietary syntax, which ultimately is really difficult to learn and pick up on as an end user. And, again, forces you to really rely on either predefined templates set up in spreadsheets by that vendor or relying on the vendor or consultants to really handle a lot of that work for you, which inherently gets really expensive and really decreases that kind of ownership that you have over your modeling.

The approach that we take is what we like to call the cube way, where our method of integrating our database with spreadsheets to link up your information into your reports and models does not require any of that heavy code. It's a more modern tech stack that we're founded on with our patent pending API connection into spreadsheets, which really keeps you in that driver's seat of spinning up your own new reports, connecting your own reports to that cloud database, or planning, budgeting, and forecasting, making our system a much more scalable and flexible solution for our customers.

Next slide here.

And the way this really works is what Qube does to kind of contain all of your data is we link up into all of your source systems in a cloud hosted database.

So this can be your general ledger or accounting systems like NetSuite or Yardi as a more real estate specific engine. We can pull in data from payroll systems like Paylocity, ADP, data from CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, or even data from data warehouses.

Really any data source that you're currently taking and extracting and dumping into spreadsheets for reporting and planning, we're linking up that data into a cloud hosted system instead to better store that information versus relying on spreadsheets to store your data. But again, that ultimate end user experience is really gonna feel super intuitive, flexible, and dynamic because the way you're going to be slicing and dicing your data in your reports or building up new reports from scratch off of all that Cloud hosted data is gonna happen in that spreadsheet interface.

And our spreadsheet interface works with an Excel, Excel online, and Google Sheets on both PCs and Macs, which is really uncommon for a lot of other FP and A tools to be able to work that seamlessly with other platforms.

And we again also have this bidirectional linkage with spreadsheets too where you can make your inputs to your budgets, your forecast, and your plans in your spreadsheet models and feed that data back to the Qube cloud database.

And lastly, Qube also has an open API. So if you prefer to perform your visualizations and dashboarding in BI tools like Tableau, Looker, or Power BI, you'll have the full autonomy to export your data out of Qube to run those visualizations there. But we also have great native dashboarding functionality within Qube that I'll highlight during today's webinar.

Next slide here.

So the last kind of slide we'll cover here is our agenda for today. We're going to kinda kick off this demonstration with a few reporting examples.

I'll highlight how intuitive and easy it's going to be for you to build your own reports from scratch starting from blank spreadsheets. And I'll also highlight how we can kind of automate your existing reports and models within our spreadsheet environment, letting you keep your formats and your styles, but really systematizing that process of collecting your data. I'll also cover some dashboarding and visualizations during this reporting section.

Then after that, we're gonna kinda cover how this is all working behind the scenes. We'll walk through sort of how we're structuring your data in terms of your business hierarchies, your dimensionality, how we're feeding in your source systems data into that back end database of cube and other admin level features. And lastly, we're gonna take a peek at some planning and modeling exercises.

So we're gonna walk through collaborative budgeting, forecasting, department level planning, and of course, really address a more real estate specific model where we're reporting and planning at property levels across our various intersections of data.

So with that, we're going to dive into this live demo portion here. And, again, any questions that you have throughout this webinar, please feel free to drop them into the chat.

So where I'm going to start here is by sharing my screen, and what we're gonna kick things off with here is just an example of how quick and easy it's going to be to generate a completely brand new report from scratch in this spreadsheet environment once you're a Qube user.

So starting from a blank spreadsheet here, there's no coding language, no syntax, no cube formulas in any of these cells. I'm gonna start building up a new report, and what I really want you to take away from this is that I didn't have to learn any complex syntax, formulas, complicated formatting structures here to do this. I'm able to spin up new reports from scratch in a matter of seconds in a really intuitive pivot table like experience.

So let's say today, I'm working with Alyssa, and Alyssa wanted to see a brand new report that displayed several different metrics and KPIs across our business. She might wanna see more financial data alongside operational data. Previously, building reports like that would have required me to dump data out of multiple source systems and manually consolidate that within spreadsheets using different Excel or GSheets formulas. But now that I'm a cube user today, I'm gonna click on this add on within my spreadsheet here to start building a report from scratch and pulling data down from this cloud hosted database.

In order to do this, I'm gonna click on this new button, and building up my new report is a lot like a pivot table experience of dragging and dropping my different slicers of data or dimensions into the rows and columns of this new report.

Now these are my slicers for my kind of standard financial model, but in a more real estate example, you might have things like properties, funds, investor groups, whatever else it might be. But this is just my initial example here for right now, and we're gonna report on a few different account metrics to start. So I'm gonna drag this accounts slicer into the rows of my report, and I'm gonna first pull in some financial metrics here, like maybe total revenue.

Maybe I wanna pull in a few of these operating expense buckets like personnel, sales and marketing, corporate professional, and facilities, and travel expenses.

And underneath this, I also might wanna pull in some metrics from my payroll system to look at things like my total FTEs, maybe their salaries and their state taxes.

And lastly, maybe I have a few KPIs within my, chart of accounts or within my CRM where I wanna look at things like my customer accounts, my bookings, and maybe customers who have churned. So that's what I wanna see down the rows of this new report. And across the columns, I might wanna slice this data by time. So we'll bring in this time slicer, and we're gonna feed in a full year's worth of data inclusive of quarters and months. And I'll also add a header to report out on my scenario, which will just be my historical actuals for right now. If this is all I need to see on this new report build, I can add my other dimensions or slicers here down below as filters. And to actually build up this new report from scratch, all I have to do as an end user of Kube is click fetch data to ping this database here, and Qube is now going to construct a completely brand new report for me and populate this new report with all of my relevant data.

Now I spun this up in seconds here just in a really basic format, but before I share out this report, I always like to make sure it looks a little bit more polished and professional, and Qube is gonna let me do that very flexibly, much more dynamically than a lot of other tools in the market. So right off the bat here, I realized, you know, I have to first expand that column header to make this a little bit more readable. Maybe I wanna get rid of things like my grid lines. Maybe Alyssa told me that she really doesn't like to see quarters or years in her reports, so I'm gonna go ahead and start selecting things that aren't relevant for this example here today and deleting them like I normally would with an Excel.

And as I start making changes like this, you're gonna see that q isn't breaking this report for me. This is all retaining my formatting and retaining this data, not wiping out everything that I've spent time working on. I can also do things like throw in spaces wherever I want, maybe breaking up these KPIs for my, more financial specific data here. And as I start to make these changes here and go ahead and reopen up that cube sidebar, you'll see that if I were to accidentally fat finger this data or delete out a chunk of something, I'm not losing any references or formulas or anything to, pull this data back together within static spreadsheets.

I can easily retrieve this data again when I click fetch data to ping the cube database and cube is gonna automatically pull back all this information for me without the use of any heavy formulas, syntax, data schemas, or coding language.

And, again, this is incredibly dynamic in comparison to other FP and A platforms I've used in the past. If I did something like apply conditional formatting to make this a little bit more readable and then, again, accidentally deleted out that data, I'll still be retaining all that formatting here as I continue to refetch.

And let's say that I realized after the fact that instead of just pulling in my historical actuals, I might wanna pull in my budget for these last five months of the year. I don't have to spend time building up a new report from scratch or worse having to rely on a consultant to build that for me. What I can do today with Qube is just type budget starting in August and drag that till the end of the year, and I'm not throwing in any logic, references, or formulas into these cells here today or changing anything in that sidebar.

All I'm doing is clicking fetch data to ping that cube database again, and cube is going to automatically pick up my budgeted numbers here in these last five months for the year without breaking everything here out to the left in my spreadsheet.

So really powerful, really intuitive process here. We're really just thinking in terms of rows and columns. And even after you've built up these new reports from scratch, you can even start expanding upon the intersections of data that you're pulling in. Let's say here between March and April, I wanted to see my trailing three months of data.

Instead of having to run a formula here within the spreadsheet, I can simply insert a couple of columns here, and I can easily reference these headers here just using native Excel reference functionality. But I'm also gonna use this handy cube time shortcut, t three m, which means trailing three months. I'm adding that as a suffix to that March period so that when I click fetch data again, cube is gonna automatically drop in my trailing three months of data into that column here, which is gonna ultimately sum up to these three months here out to the left. I can even throw in a formula to make sure that that sum is accurate by tying this out here on the spreadsheet, dragging that formula down to make sure that this all aligns to what Qube has retrieved for me automatically.

And even as I start to delete out this data as well, Qube won't break that formula. It's gonna retain all my calculations that I have in the spreadsheet and continuously pull my data back from the cloud.

And one formula that's particularly useful for real estate customers is something like lifetime to date. You might wanna see the lifetime to date expenses of your properties or the revenue generated by certain properties. So we also have an LTD functionality where I can say, show me my historical actuals, at the, you know, lifetime to date, or I could even say for the rest of this year for starting in April. So I can pick April here, add in a suffix that says r o y, hit enter, click fetch data, and this is gonna give me the rest of that year's worth of data, or I can use ltd as a function. Lots of really nice time shortcuts to make this process a lot simpler for you.

Now this is just one really kinda high level summary view into our data as well, but we have the ability to easily investigate all of our information from any spreadsheet without having to run data dumps out of our general ledgers or other systems.

So right now, we're just looking at total revenue here. Maybe I wanna see what's summing into my revenue for this last month of actuals in July. Maybe that value looks a little bit higher or lower than expected.

All I have to do with Qube to investigate that data is navigate to this right hand sidebar and drill down into that number, and Qube is now going to pull up this detailed report for me that's going to capture every transactional line item that was summing into that grand total revenue from my report. So we're gonna see all of my lowest level revenue accounts here. We have things like support revenue, platform revenue, implementation.

Other types of slicers of data are also flowing in here, like different products that were summing into my revenue. Maybe I had different markets or properties in your case. This value column here is gonna tie back to that two point eight million that I had on that original ad hoc report here. But if we go back to this drill down, you'll see that out to the right of that number, we're also getting additional insight into things like memos, transaction codes, and dates, which are really low level GL information that we're pulling out of our source systems, and we no longer have to waste time jumping back and forth between platforms to gain this type of insight.

So the idea here was really to emphasize that ease of use, that flexible functionality of cubes reporting features when you're spinning up new reports from scratch to address any ad hoc report requests. But another really key thing about cube is that we're also able to maintain your existing reports and models and better automate the process of pulling together all of your different slices of data.

So to highlight that, I'm gonna open up this kind of pre formatted model that I have here for myCube today. And this model that we're looking at here is more of a classic financial BVA analysis where we have different P and L accounts here that we're running in actuals and budget comparison against, and we also have some operational KPIs at the bottom coming from Salesforce and our payroll system. And today, this is just a template here that's not yet connected to my kube cloud database. This is just a model capturing my accounts that I wanna report on down the rows, my different versions of data and time periods across the columns. There's, again, no logic, formulas, or references to static data dumps here in the spreadsheet.

But in order to cubify this report today and retrieve all of my data back from that cloud hosted database that is that back end of cube, all I'm gonna have to do here as an end user is highlight this report, capturing those row headers and column headers.

And in my cube sidebar here that I have opened up, I'm gonna click select and select range to activate that API that connects cubes back end database to the spreadsheet.

So as I do that, cube is picking up and reading information across the spreadsheet and finding things like my scenarios dimension and time dimension in the column headers. It's recognizing accounts down the rows, and other pivots of my data like my departments, my entities, my products, or properties are gonna be dropped into the filters here if they're not showing up on this report.

But to actually retrieve all of this data today, all I'm doing here as an end user of Kube is clicking fetch data to ping that back end Kube Cloud database, and Kube is now automatically populating this entire report for me based upon the intersections of all of these headers in my spreadsheet.

So, again, there's no convoluted syntax, code, formulas, or logic here in the formula bar or hidden in the rows and columns, which is super unique to Qube because a lot of other FP and A tools out there in the market do have to rely on a lot of that convoluted syntax, which inherently makes those products really impossible for their customers to own and manage themselves because they're always thinking in some specific language anytime they're making changes.

But right away, once I've cubified my report, I have full autonomy to start making any dynamic updates to this model as I see fit. Right away, we'll see that my entity filter in this sidebar is pointed at my global company, so a very high level consolidated view of all of my data. This could be all properties in a real estate example. But today, if I just wanna narrow into one entity at a time, I don't have to run a data dump out of my general ledger. I can just pick from this drop down filter whichever entity I wanna report on and click fetch data to ping the Kube cloud database again, and Kube is gonna automatically refresh everything that we see here without the use of heavy formulas or logic.

I can also keep things that I like about my spreadsheets like drop downs, pick lists, and drivers to maybe roll my report forward to the next month once I've actualized the month of July. And, again, clicking fetch data will allow Qube to recognize that I wanna bring in that next month of data, and it's gonna automatically roll that into my report.

And we can also use those nice time shortcuts to do something like a year to date aggregation. Throwing in a YTD suffix after those months and clicking fetch will allow Qb to sum up the year to date value of all of these accounts here without having to dump out data for every single month into my spreadsheet and manually sum that up.

And, lastly, within any of your existing reports, you're not stuck with that original version of your report once you've cubified it. You can start building upon this to pull in more intersections of data. So, for example, if I wanna look at my forecast for the month here today, I'll just go ahead and type out that header here and maybe reference that month of July from that drop down. And I'm not throwing in any logic or formulas in these cells. I've simply added those headers, and I'll click fetch data, and Qub will automatically pull in my forecasted data for that month here in this new column.

Now typically, after kind of walking through this process, the next question that I get is, how is this all working? How is Qube storing this data and giving me this easy access to my information within the spreadsheets? And that's what we'll kinda dive into here next.

So I'm gonna open up the back end of Qube here right now to kind of walk through the more admin level perspective of Qube. This isn't where most end users are going to be working, but this is really the place where we're syncing up to your data sources, adding structure, and building out the hierarchies to slice and dice your data by all of those same pivots that you saw me using in the spreadsheet environment, and things like setting up end user security will also happen here. Now we're gonna walk through this dimensions tab here today to kinda cover the basic building blocks of your cube model.

So this is where we're building out all of those slicers, those filters of things like your properties, your funds here. This is my kinda general cube model that I have today where in my accounts dimension, I have my chart of accounts coming from my general ledger. But also at the bottom, I have other KPIs and metrics coming from things like maybe my payroll system, my CRM here. I have departments, different scenarios that I'm reporting and planning by here, and time periods.

And I also have entities, products, and markets.

But in a more real estate specific example, we might have totally different dimensions than this, and this will all be built customized to your business hierarchies and criteria.

So in a real estate example, we might have more rental income specific metrics and KPIs that we're reporting on, or maybe there's revenue from our properties or different operating expenses related to things like professional fees or maybe repairs to our properties, landscaping expenses.

And we also have several different statistics like committed capital, ownership percentage of different properties, contributions and distributions out to our investors and stakeholders, and even some KPIs around more rental property specific metrics such as, rental prices or square footage of different properties. So So we're gonna custom build all these KPIs according to what's relevant for your reporting and your planning from a real estate perspective. And we'll also, of course, build hierarchies to allow you to slice and dice your p and l by your different properties. You can categorize those properties in any way that you choose.

In this example, we're summing up properties into months here. So we have Arizona properties, California, all our different state groupings here to more easily consolidate our data within our reports and even consolidate that to the total all properties level. And we have a funds dimension in this cube as well. So this is representing those kind of buckets of funds that we can pull from when we're investing in new properties or, you know, improving existing ones.

So we have all of these kind of different categories of funds that we can track and plan within to kind of better indicate where our cash is coming from or where we're spending out of.

So that's the kind of real estate, specific lens here today, but there's a couple other things to highlight within that more core financial model.

So, again, the back end of cube is really meant to be super self serviced and easy for our customers to administer themselves. You're not gonna have to work with any complex coding languages here either similar to that spreadsheet environment. As you're making changes and updates to your models here, you're gonna have the power to do things like reorder dimensions over time if you're restructuring your chart of accounts and wanna make some updates there, or even editing properties of different dimensions to update names of accounts or where they're rolling up in those business hierarchies.

So this is really unique. Unlike a lot of the other tools I've used in the past, you're not gonna have to learn fifty to a hundred different complex properties to make these types of adjustments here. Qube is really built to be this super customer self-service owned platform.

But the one dimension too that's important to touch back on here, especially as it relates back to planning is scenarios. We're, of course, loading in your historical actuals from your general ledger and other source systems. We can lock down those actuals to make sure that they're not getting written over over time. We can pull in your budgets, your forecasts, rolling forecast, and what if scenarios, and you can store as many versions of data here in Qube as you want.

And Qube also has great functionality for spinning up copies of existing versions of data as well. So if I have a finalized version of a forecast that's been approved by the board that I've locked down and added security to, but maybe I wanna spin up a reforecast off of that scenario, I don't have to do all that work in static spreadsheets by copying and pasting data in different places. I can simply click this edit button here and copy any existing scenarios here, and this will create a new version of that data that I can give whatever name I want that now my different budget owners or department heads can start planning in within their spreadsheet models.

But now that they're using cube, they'll have that power to push all of those changes back to this cloud hosted scenario. And we'll dive into that more later on in the demo, but the big idea here is that we're not gonna have to rely on spreadsheets or files to store all these different scenarios of our data anymore. Cube is this real kind of source of truth behind the scenes in the cloud that's capturing all these different containers of your data in a system.

And we also have really great robust features here to actualize your data automatically over time through our merge scenarios feature, and we have this AI generative smart forecasting feature that enables Q to automatically create new scenarios of data for you based upon any information that you're feeding into this model. You could pump your historical actuals into a smart forecast, and Qube will analyze all the trends and analyze any statistics within that data, creating a totally brand new scenario from scratch for you so that you don't have to do that work manually in a spreadsheet.

So, again, the idea here is that this is meant to be really intuitive, easy to self-service here. There's no reliance on Kube staff or consultants when it comes to kind of administrating the back end here of Kube. But the other piece too that Kube is doing to help systematize all of your data in the cloud is connecting to your source systems via the source data tab. The source data tab is where we're gonna set up connectors to pull in data from your general ledger, whether that's Yardi, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks.

We can pull in data from other source systems as well and even allow you to load in data via flat files for something like payroll that's maybe only coming in once or twice a month. And you'll have the power to either schedule the uploads of your data to sync into Qube automatically overnight or on a weekly basis, and you'll also always have the ability to on demand feed your data into Qube as well. This is a really useful feature during something like month end close when you're maybe making lots of journal entries in your source systems. Let's say I just made some entries in NetSuite that I immediately wanna feedback to Qube to view in my reports.

All I'm gonna have to do here is click this import button, and Kyub is gonna first ask me to resync that connector to my general ledger. And what that resync is doing is it's pinging my source system and checking if there was anything new that was added there that might not have a place to live within Kyub yet. So, typically, this will be new GL accounts that you've built in your systems, but it could also be something like a new cost center or a new property or maybe a new segmentation of your data. And if Kube finds things like that, it's gonna give you a notification that you have to first map those items to our platform before importing that new data.

I'll click this map button here, and Qub is gonna pull up this interactive, super intuitive mapping screen for me that's gonna capture my entire chart of accounts for my general ledger on the left hand side. And on the right, it's gonna tell me how I've already mapped those items into Qub. Now this will all get set up for you during implementation, but you'll have the flexibility to make changes to these mappings going forward. If I don't like where shipping income is flowing into today, I can simply pick from this drop down menu to push that elsewhere, or I can apply a filter to just pinpoint those new accounts that came through from the resync of my data and then map those into existing dimensions that are already set up in cube or just as easily build new ones from scratch.

So, again, this is a no code back end solution. It's meant to be really owned by you, by our customers, not owned by an implementation team or by a consultant, really giving you that autonomy and that ownership over your cube model.

So we've walked through kind of how easy it is for cube to allow you to spin up new reports from scratch and automate your existing templates given that we're storing your data in the cloud and providing that seamless API integration into any spreadsheets. But the next piece I'm gonna dive into here is how we can start actually planning and modeling within spreadsheets for budgeting, forecasting, and planning purposes.

So to walk through that process here, I'm gonna pull up this model here that I've set up for my forecasting. And this is just a sample model, so yours might look totally different, but we're gonna look to automate and connect into whatever you have built for planning today. But we also have templates that you can leverage as a starting point. But this model that I'm showing here is my quarterly reforecasting templates where I'm planning at the department level here between two different scenarios. I have an original kind of final version of a forecast that has security on it in the back end of cube, so different budget owners can't make changes here anymore. But I'm also referencing a copy of that scenario called q three reforecast.

Right now, these two scenarios are completely in sync. I'll prove that out by deleting and refetching that data. But what I'm gonna do today is act like I'm one of these department heads who has this model, and I'm gonna start making some inputs to my q three reforecast scenario.

Now where I'm gonna make these inputs here is from this forecast input tab. And the two biggest things that we hear the most from our customers that were really difficult and tedious to manage when it came to running their planning cycles out of static spreadsheets was first just compiling and collecting the proper datasets to kick off that planning process.

And secondly, collecting different inputs from various budget owners over time can also be super difficult and time consuming when you're emailing all these static files around and summing them up manually in spreadsheets.

Qub really helps to automate both of those functions. So firstly, on the front end of any planning cycles, we're gonna make it really easy to prepare your relevant data in a spreadsheet because we're connecting those spreadsheets to the cloud. You'll see in my model that I have my historical actuals for the first part of this year as well as coming from last year's actuals, but I'm not relying on any Excel formulas to pull this data together. This is all coming from Qube because I've connected to the spreadsheet via that sidebar.

This means that as a budget owner, I can easily pivot on my data however I need to, flipping from the marketing department to the sales department, fetching my data from the cloud again, and Qube will automatically retrieve that relevant intersection of data without me having to spin up twenty different tabs within my workbook for every individual department level plan.

Now not only is cube gonna help on that front end of that planning cycle by saving you tons of time in terms of preparing your data, cube is also gonna help with the collection of inputs that different budget owners are making from spreadsheets as well. So today, maybe I'm the head of marketing here, and maybe, Alyssa just told me that we're gonna be renting out a new office space this year. So we need to add that additional rent expense to our reforecast.

So on this rent expense line here, I'm gonna start plugging in some numbers starting this month. Maybe our rent is nine thousand a month, and we're gonna rent till the end of the year. So I'll drag that across my spreadsheet.

Now instead of emailing this file back to Alyssa and having her manually sum this up across her reports and manually edit her models, I can let Qube do all of that work for me when I publish this data back into the cloud. I can even add a memo to indicate what that expense is for by calling this new office for marketing. And as soon as I click publish data, cube is gonna read all the changes that I made on this spreadsheet and compare it against what was originally in that reforecast scenario, and it's gonna now store those changes in the cloud. So this is no longer static data sitting in some spreadsheet on someone's desktop that would be impossible to reference from other places.

This is cube cloud hosted data living in this scenario, which means now from any other report, whether it's another tab in the same workbook or a workbook on Alyssa's desktop or even somebody working in Google Sheets, we'll be able to refetch our data from any type of report that's tracking those changes, and I'll automatically be able to view a forty five thousand dollar difference between these two scenarios on the marketing department's line. And I'm no longer using any Excel wizardry to compile this data together. This is all coming back from cube, which means I can easily pull together other pivots of this data, maybe at the OPEX account level instead of departments, fetch that back from the cloud, and we'll see that exact same variance on the rent expense line.

And everything I've been showing here so far in Excel works the exact same way within Google Sheets. We have the exact same type of sidebar here. So I can run a similar model here out of Google Sheets here where I'm pointed at the sales department instead. Maybe our sales manager prefers to work in Google Sheets instead of Excel.

Maybe this manager is expecting some training expenses here that are gonna increase by maybe ten percent month over month. So they can go ahead and fill out their template in the way that they'd expect to. I can take last month's actuals, multiply that by ten percent here for that next month's forecast, and drag that across my spreadsheet on that training line, and publish that same data back to the cloud here, just like I did from that Excel example. So Qube is summing up this information into that total, training expense account here so that now whether I'm working in Google Sheets here in a variance analysis report like you saw me working in in Excel, I can fetch the data back here and track that variance.

Or if my manager prefers to work in Excel instead, they could also pull together a variance analysis report and fetch back that data and view that impact of the added training expense populate on the sales line.

So regardless of where your different team members prefer to work, they're gonna be able to stay in their existing models where they're already comfortable working, but be able to leverage that power of the cube engine to more easily collect their information and report out on those impacts.

So we've walked through, you know, high level, how we're planning, summing up, and aggregating this type of input within the spreadsheet here just for kind of a more financial specific model. But I'm gonna pivot next into a more real estate specific example where you're gonna see this more in the lens of your business and your operations.

So I'm gonna pull up another template here within Excel to start walking through this. And this model here is my prime invest realty model here that's tied back to that real estate company that I showcased in the back end of queue with those pivots of properties and funds. Now this company is more of a private equity firm, so they have a bunch of deals with different investors that are helping them, invest in various properties. So they like to track and report out on things like the contributions across their different properties, the distributions of funds, and the net cash flow as well.

And they have a number of different reports set up in this package here that they have now automated using q. So we're gonna start out by actually just deleting out the data from this report here. And again, this is a report that's all the way down to the total properties level, even breaking this out by individual properties, and we're gonna be taking a look at all year's contributions, distributions, and net cash flow. So that kind of lifetime to date lens of our properties.

This report has been cubified in the same way that I showed from the earlier reporting examples. So instead of having to previously use a bunch of Excel formulas to cobble together data here within the spreadsheet in all of these cells, I can just click fetch data to ping the cube database, and this will drop in all of these accounts here across every single one of my properties in a matter of seconds.

And given that cube is this kind of pivot table like engine in the cloud, I'll also be able to slice and dice this data in different ways, maybe filtering just to one year at a time like twenty twenty three, fetching that data back from the database, and we're gonna see our numbers refresh and pull down differently here. Or I could even slice this by a different fund if I wanted to just look at fund one, fetch back that data, and just see the information that's attributable to that fund.

So that's kind of just one picture into this report here. We can also spin this up in other types of formats where we're tracking our total properties, contributions, distributions, and remaining values at the quarterly level instead. So again, this is a pre cubified report. If I delete out this data, I can fetch that back from the cloud here and see all this information flow back, and we've even added a toggle here in this case to start slicing and dicing by different properties.

So I live in Minneapolis, so I might wanna see what's going on with all of my Minnesota properties today. So I'll set that up on my filter here, and you'll see my column headers update as a result, and I can ping that cube database again just to see the total contributions, distributions, and remaining value of all of my investments and my properties just for that Minnesota grouping.

Now this is just kind of a reporting example here where we're just pulling together data that we fed back to the kube cloud database from our general ledgers and other source systems, but we can also run our planning cycles in this more real estate specific lens as well. This next tab here that I have is my property management planning template here. And what we're doing here in this template is we're planning by individual properties here, so all of our different investments, for a quarterly reforecast scenario. And our metrics that we're planning around are things like the total rent for our different types of property units, like our studios, one bedrooms and two bedrooms, our square footage available, our total available units, occupied units.

And we also have a more of a traditional kind of operating expense plan at the bottom here to track and plan for admin expenses, insurance, marketing expenses, and property maintenance as well. So this template works really similarly to that model that I was showing earlier. We've fetched back our actuals here. We have fetched back our current plan.

We can pivot from property to property. So maybe I'll pick one of my New York properties since cube is headquartered in New York. We'll choose radiant residences today and fetch back that data. So cube is gonna automatically pull in data that's just specific to that property, and I can now start planning for these expenses or my revenue.

So maybe we are working with a new contractor and we're expecting our landscaping expenses to start increasing for this property here, by maybe a five percent increase month over month. So I can go ahead and calculate that in the spreadsheet by taking last month's actuals, multiplying that by one point o five, dragging that across my template here. So we're just gonna make that input there on the spreadsheet, and I can now publish that data back to cube using the sidebar to allow cube to collect the outputs.

So cube is now rolling up that information to my quarter one reforecast for this specific property. And now to actually track the impact of that increased expense, I can navigate to my property variance analysis report here. So on this report, I have all of my individual properties summed up into their states, comparing an original budget and a quarterly reforecast that I created as a spin off of that budget. So now if I scroll down to my New York section here, I can fetch back my data, and I'm gonna see for that radiant residences property that we're gonna have a variance between those two scenarios as a result of that increased landscaping expense.

And we can not only just plan for expenses, kinda traditional operating expenses, we can also start planning for things like revenue as well by driving up increases to rent. Maybe I'll go ahead and pick a different property, maybe in California, Oak Ridge Oasis. We'll retrieve the data for that property here today for our current reforecast, and maybe we realize that we need to start driving up our revenue for our studio properties, so we're gonna increase the rent for the back half of this forecast to maybe six hundred dollars. We'll make that increase here and drag that across.

That's a pretty low rent for California, but they're getting a great deal here at this property. And we'll go ahead and publish that data to Cube. And as soon as Cube reads that output, we can navigate again to that property variance analysis report and refetch our data, and we'll be able to see that impact on our total net income in that California section as a result of driving up that revenue cost. And we can also retrieve this for, you know, just the total available units or total occupied units.

We can track things like our average studio rent here, pulling a different KPI that's maybe gonna be impacted by that. We may have pushed this into a different account than what I was expecting, but this should be refreshing here, but maybe we don't have that property on our spreadsheet today. But, again, any changes that you're making here in these templates can get fetched and published within queues that you're not having to manually consolidate this across the board within all of your templates today. This This will save hours, maybe even days of time for your team because, you know, previously, when we're relying on Excel to store our data, that collection process becomes a lot more convoluted, but Kube is really helping with that systemization there.

And we can also set up our models in really different ways too. I have an example of a five year forecast, which is more pertinent to real estate companies since they're typically projecting further out into the future than a lot of other industries are. So we can plan for all of those same types of metrics, not only for our current year's forecast, but we also have several years out into the future going out to twenty twenty eight. So maybe we're expecting to, change some things around our average studio rent here for this Cascade Cove condominiums.

Maybe not this year, but in the future, we're expecting to start increasing this year over year. We'll go up to nine hundred and fifty for twenty twenty five, push that across the spreadsheet here. Maybe for twenty twenty six, we're gonna be pushing this up to a thousand dollars. So any changes that we want to make here, we can do this for more than just one year at a time and publish back those changes to the cloud and then analyze that again from a variance analysis report.

Now we can also retrieve all of our changes by OpEx accounts as well. So if we want a different lens into those, publishes that we've been making, we can also fetch our data across all properties at once and view the impacts that we've made from all of those planning templates.

Now we oftentimes, you know, need to still perform ad hoc analysis in the real estate space as well. So if I wanted to pull together a report that maybe just showed me the high level state revenue across all my properties, I could also just open up a new tab here in my spreadsheet and click on this new button and start dragging my properties into the rows here. And instead of pulling in all properties at a time, I can just select these parent level groupings, like all of my Arizona properties, my California properties, Colorado, all these different states, and I even have different groupings of my properties that are kind of using an alternative hierarchy feature called tags in queue, where I can retrieve my affordable housing properties, home building, multifamily, and student housing.

And maybe I'm going to throw in, twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four across the top here. So we'll pull in couple years worth of data, and we wanna report out on one of our specific accounts. Maybe we'll choose just total revenue.

Now I can add my other dimensions here as filters down below, and we can now fetch back our data, and Qubo is gonna build out that structure of this new report with all of our sum total state properties, our groupings of our properties by those different categories, and we're gonna see that data flow in for revenue, which we can then modify by removing decimal points, throwing in commas here, formatting this however we need to, just like I showed earlier in that other ad hoc reporting example.

And the key thing too is that you can continuously drill back to your data too from that property level. So if we're just looking at high level revenue here for California and we wanna see the individual properties that make up that total revenue, we can drill down into that data and Qube will pull up this drill down report for us, showing us every individual property that summed up into that California grouping as well as the accounts that we're actually summing into total revenue, like late fees, penalties, and rental income.

Last piece to kinda cover off on here. You know, this has all just been traditional financial reports. We're just kind of tracking values within spreadsheets, but, of course, there's always a need to share out further analysis, visualizations, dashboards off of all of your data that you have living in Qube, and Qube makes that process really easy. In this model here from a real estate lens, I've built just a sample board deck, file here today where I have my BVA by state, my revenue breakdown by my categories like affordable housing and multifamily units, quarterly revenue trends here.

All of this data that you see here is bed from this data table that I have set up within this spreadsheet today. So this table is linked back to all of these dashboards and charts on this tab, but this table is not a static Excel table anymore. This is all linked back to queue. So what that means is that if I were to delete out the data here from this table down below, you're gonna see my charts get impacted up above, but I can easily fetch that data back, and this is gonna repopulate my information accordingly.

And we have lots of customers building up really pre polished board deck presentations like this and sharing them out to end users. And the beautiful thing about Qube is that you don't have to be a licensed Qube user to receive reports or visualizations or files because Qube is already just pulling down data as values within the spreadsheet instead of using all that embedded convoluted coding language like a lot of other FP and A tools used.

But we also have another side to dashboarding within Qube where you're not just having to leverage a spreadsheet to spin up your dashboards. We also have more system built dashboards that reside on the homepage of that Qube web portal.

So any user who's logging into q u b is going to be able to view these dashboards here according to their security permissions that we've set up for them. And these dashboards are gonna work more like a BI tool, and that they're completely linked to your most recent up to date data that's living in the q cloud database. You can set up scheduled refreshes of these dashboards to run overnight. So hopefully, no one's working at four AM, but the next time they log into kube, they're gonna see their updated numbers here. And these dashboards are all completely interactive, where we can hover over these charts to get nice insights into our numbers. We can drill back to the underlying data, and we can even apply filters to slice and dice our charts by our properties or entities in my case here today.

And all of these charts here and all of the data that we've been working with within the spreadsheets here, we can set up permissions for our different end users to not access certain slices of data. So if I'm adding Alyssa to my cube today as maybe a new budget owner on the marketing team, as an admin of my cube, I can go to this team's setting here in the web, and I can click on this new button here. I can fill out Alyssa's email address here and set her up in a permissioning group, and I'm gonna make sure that she can still modify financial data in cube, but I do wanna lock Alyssa out of certain sensitive slices of data. So maybe I don't want Alyssa to be able to access sensitive HR metrics and KPIs, so I'll lock her out of those types of accounts so that she can't see people's salaries, and I'll make sure that she can only work in her department today.

So all that security adds robustness here to the process of planning and reporting. You can invite multiple collaborators to be pushing data and refreshing data in and out of your cube, but really kind of lock down those sets of data that they can view.

So this is the overall content that I had planned to share here for today's more kind of real estate specific webinar.

I hope that all of this content was useful and really kinda help to showcase that dynamic flexibility of Qube to really adopt and embrace any models across any type of industry, and especially to illustrate the the concept that this is not a consultant owned platform or a Qube staff owned platform. This is really gonna be a system that you'll be in the driver's seat of.

Pass it back to you, Alyssa.

Awesome. Thank you so much. That was awesome.

I have a few questions for you.

One of the first ones is can you limit access to users to certain departments or plants?

Yes. So, yeah, I'm sure that was asked before I just walked through that security piece, but definitely any of your dimensions across your cube, even your properties, different fun buckets, you can limit that access using that kind of team security feature.

Great.

Is there an easy way to see which departments have their updated numbers in Qube?

Yes. So, yeah, the easiest way to do that would be, you know, running a report that lists out departments and lists out maybe, you know, two versions of a scenario in a spreadsheet where you can see kind of the original version of a budget or a forecast and then that updated scenario. So tracking those kind of scenarios across the department side by side gives you that really quick visibility into kind of who has made changes when.

And we've even seen customers sometimes set up, like, a status field within that where there are different budget owners or department heads can mark whether they're in progress of working on their plans today, and we can start retrieving that kind of updated status from that spreadsheet as well.

Great.

And one more I will throw at you before we get into the resources.

Is it typical to work with a consultant to onboard queue?

No. So we don't do any outsource consulting when it comes to onboarding with Qube. You know, you're still, of course, gonna receive lots of training from us, though. We're not gonna just leave you in the dust to figure everything out on your own.

The way our implementation and onboarding works is we get your Qube finalized, stood up. We build everything out, pull in all your data, tie it out. But then we walk through about four weeks of training sessions with you to make sure that you're enabled to really leverage all the features that I was walking through today, that you're gonna be the power user of your platform. You'll be working with in house cube staff during this process.

But after that, if you do have questions or you wanna start building out additional use cases, we have baked in customer support services within our customer packages, so you'll be able to leverage that for any ongoing support that you need.

Beautiful.

Alright. Thank you so much, Taylor, for answering the questions and for taking us through everything.

Before we wrap up, I'm just going to share a couple resources for continued learning, after the webinar.

So here they are. The first is to request a custom cube demo. So if you liked what you saw today, but you have some more specific questions or just really wanna take a deeper dive into what Cube can do for you, a custom Cube demo is definitely the way to go.

So you can either click the link in these slides. It will also include the link in the email that we'll be sending to you after this.

Next is our biweekly newsletter, the finance fix. This is written by our founder and CEO, Christina Ross, who also happens to be a former three time CFO. So she definitely knows her stuff when she when it comes to finance. She has a lot of great contacts in the space, and they'll join her on the newsletter, to share their thoughts, their opinions, and their greatest tips and tricks for how to succeed in finance and, move up in your career. So definitely suggest checking that out. And lastly is our strategic finance pros Slack community.

The the whole point of this community is to connect with like minded finance professionals. People are always asking questions in there, about things that they need help with, lending their expertise.

And then we also share a lot of content in there, job opportunities, networking opportunities, stuff like that. So if that sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend you check that out. And without further ado, that is the end of our presentation today. So thank you so much for watching, and thank you again, Taylor, for taking us through.

Hope everyone has a good day.

Thanks, everyone.

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