Video Transcription
Alright.
I think two minutes after the hour, I think we can kinda jump right in. That sounds good with everybody? Awesome. So, everyone, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today, for CQube Live. We'll be walking through a product tour specifically for a SaaS audience. So a lot of the content today will seem very relevant to your industry with examples by none other than Jim, who I will introduce shortly, who will be sort of man of the hour for you walking through the platform.
To get started, some really quick housekeeping rules.
At the bottom of your screen, you will see a bar. There will be an area that says q and a. As we're walking through today, you can answer or ask any questions that you want. We We will answer those towards the end of the presentation, but ask them as they come. Right? It's easier to write things down as those ideas pop up. Additionally, we will be having the recording and slides added.
Right at the after this, presentation, I will be sending out an email. That will also include, the endpoint of our presentation of that q and a. So if you do at any time need to bounce, please feel free to still ask your question and you should see it answered or hear it answered at the end of the recording.
So, yeah, to really kick us off, I'd like to e introduce Jim. Jim is our head of solutions consulting here at, CUBE, and he has over fifteen years experience in FP and A consulting. He's our de facto expert. My team leads on him a lot over here in marketing, and Jim is really, has been bought into a lot of industries, particularly in the SaaS space. So, without further ado and just to really get us started, Jim, I'm I'm happy to hand things off to you.
Fantastic. Good, good to chat with everybody today. As Sarah mentioned, I have a lot of experience in this space, specifically implementing other platforms. I've been with Keith for just shy of three years.
But before that, I spent about twelve years at an FP and A consulting firm where I used to implement t m one, Hyperion s space, and oversaw our adaptive practice over there. So, hopefully, I get to show you what I find so compelling about Cube as we go through today. So thanks for joining. We can go to the first slide here, Sarah.
So real quick, I'm gonna do an overview of Cube just for those who are not familiar, kind of, you know, give what what's different about us compared to the rest of the FP and a market.
I'll spend most most of the time doing a demo, and then we'll definitely cover off any questions at the end. So as we go through, fire away questions in the q and a section or the chat, either one, and we'll go through. But we'll kick off with a quick poll, which is how do you currently manage financial data integration across oh, going crazy there, Sarah.
Your different SaaS operations.
So we'll kick off this poll. You can see the answer is going down the right. Right? A is gonna be manual data entry from multiple sources, automated integration with SaaS ERP systems, custom built solutions for subscription data specialized at PNA software, or the always great other. So go ahead and fire away. Always, fun to kinda see what people, have to add at the beginning of the session here.
And I don't think it lets me vote, which is a bummer. But, I guess my opinion is not that valid.
Alright. Let's see what we got coming through here.
Yeah. Data integration is always I mean, whether you have a platform or not, it's gonna be a big deal.
Alright.
Perfect. Looks like it just closed down. Should be seeing a pop up with results. Pretty much everybody, manual data entry from multiple sources, you know, pretty standard for for most of the crews, so everybody put that in there. So let's jump to the next one.
Alright.
So when we talk about Qube here, what's Qube about what's different about Qube, we're an f b and a platform. So we're gonna help you with your budgeting, forecasting, reporting needs, board decks, all that good stuff, dashboarding.
But what's different about our approach is we really lean on the flexibility of the spreadsheet being our primary interface.
I have twelve plus years of history of implementing solutions that primarily forced you into a web browser, which can be a good experience, but the downsides are it's super rigid.
As soon as you you're like you have to rip and replace replace your entire model, move it up into that application. And, usually, the first eighty percent of those projects goes okay. But as soon as you hit any nuance, complexity, one offs about your business, they offs about your business, they usually either struggle to adapt to those or it takes six months to get it stood up. So Qube is saying, hey. Let's take that same philosophy, but use the spreadsheet as our interface so we don't have to rip and replace everything. So if you go to the next slide here, Sarah.
So that we call that the kind of cube way, the cube approach, and we're using more intuitive technology, more flexibility, more formatting options. I mean, you can go down the list here compared to the kind of the old way where we have crazy formulas and spreadsheets maybe to get your data there, intense coding and schemas in the back end. Right? It's twenty twenty four.
We don't wanna be doing that anymore. We should, you know, emphasize ease of use, flexibility, and that's what you're gonna see during the demo today. So let's go to the last slide or next slide here. And that is kind of the data flow.
Right? We've mentioned in that poll, like, what are people doing today? You're essentially doing this flow without that middle step. Right?
You're getting data from all these systems, manually extracting them, doing manual formulas, mappings, so on and so forth in your spreadsheets on the right. What Qube does is we slot in really seamless flowing in from a system like a QuickBooks or NetSuite. But where you're gonna flowing in from a system like a QuickBooks or NetSuite. But where you're gonna interact with that is in your spreadsheets, but you're not gonna have any of the manual work anymore.
Plus, you can push data from your spreadsheets back into the system. So notice that here, I'll go in the other direction back into the database. So any of your budgets, forecast, adjustments, those are all gonna be easily pushed, summarized in our centralized database. So real quick, that's the data flow.
We'll go to our next slide.
Our last one before we get into the fun, what are we gonna show you today? So we're gonna start with reporting.
Gonna give you a sense of, hey. What's it look like to build a report with Q? What can I do with my existing reports? Do I have to scrap those?
Can you use them? We'll talk through the back end. How How do we set things up? What's a day in the life of an administrator look like?
And then finally, we'll wrap up with a bunch of SaaS specific planning exercises as we go through it. So that being said, I'm gonna take control here and start showing you cube. And I am starting in an Excel file.
Just note, everything of the thing I do in Excel works exactly the same in GSheets. So if you're a team that only uses GSheets, I will show GSheets interactivity during the session today. But anything you do in GSheets works in Excel, vice versa. A lot of our customers will be, you know, finance team on Excel, maybe marketing in the broader organization in G Sheets.
Cube's gonna fit really well with your organization as we go through. But just note that I'm starting in Excel, but every click I do is gonna apply in GSheets as well. And we're really the only application out there that seamlessly works with both. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna start by building a report from scratch.
Right? So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn on our cube sidebar, and this is going to be connecting to our database in the cloud where we're storing all your financial data, maybe your SaaS metrics, any thing that might be coming through. And maybe I'm working with Sarah, and Sarah asked me for a report. She says, Jim, I wanna see a report.
I need two years of data, like a twenty four month trend. I wanna see all my operating expenses coming in from QuickBooks. I need to see maybe my FTEs coming in from, like, an ADP, Payvocity, Bamboo. And and then I have Salesforce metrics regarding my bookings.
Right? So I wanna see all those in one report. I say, great. That sounds like a great report.
If I didn't have Qube, that would be a nightmare. It just blew up my morning. Here, I click new, and I have all my core business hierarchies available to me. Right?
So I can see I've got my accounts, and it's gonna be very pivot table like. I'm gonna drop my accounts into the rows, and it instantly pops up and shows me all the data I have available in our queue database. So I have my full three statement model coming in from my ERP or my GL, but then I have sales metrics. Maybe those are coming in from Salesforce.
I have HR metrics. Maybe I just have KPIs that I brought into Qube as well, like CAC or, you know, lifetime value for my customers, whatever it might be.
Net dollar retention, things like that. I can have all those stored in here. But just for the sake of this one, Sarah asked me for a report. She wants to see all my operating expense accounts from my GL, so I can just click on that. Then I'm gonna come in and usually just click, hey. I want my bookings from Salesforce.
I could have pulled in, like, up for renewal if I want to, whatever it might be. And then I need my FTEs from my, payroll system. So really easy. Couple selections clicks.
I'm gonna pull up my time periods here. Let's just do twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four. And then finally, I'm gonna pull my scenarios. I just want my actuals.
Right? Nothing crazy. You'll actually learn this in about fifteen minutes. No joke because it is so familiar, so easy, so intuitive.
And I haven't really done anything yet on the left side. I'm just gonna say cube. Okay. Great.
That's what I need. I hit fetch. And now what cube does is it drops in the structure of my report and all of my data with a couple clicks. Right?
If I wanted to do this, pulling data from three separate systems for two years by month, by quarter, by year, it might probably take hours to gather all that. But what you're noticing, there's no Datadump tab in here. There's no formulas. Right?
If I look at this, there's no vlookup, sumifs, index matches, import ranges, and g sheets. All that disappears off my plate.
And if I accidentally delete these numbers, like, before that would be a nightmare. Now I can just hit fetch. It's gonna re re ping the database and go find those numbers for me.
Now maybe Sarah and I work together every day, and I just shoot this off to her, and we're good to go. But I usually like to make things look a little more professional before I send them out. Right? So I'll just insert some blank rows.
So everything you do today from a spreadsheet kind of formatting perspective, every bold in format, font, color, anything you want, you can apply here, and cube does not disturb that. Right? So if I go and delete this, other applications I've used in the past would, like, blow up your formatting, remove those rows I added in, whatever it might be. But really slick here because we're taking advantage of your existing skill sets.
Right? You know how to format things in a, a spreadsheet here. You're not gonna have to sit through forty hours of report builder training for some new application.
You can pick this up and run with it right away. Right? If I scroll down, I do have those other metrics, like my bookings from my sale Salesforce or my, you know, CRM. I've got my FTEs coming in from my payroll system. Great. Maybe I don't want the quarters in here. I could have unselected those, but I'm just gonna manually delete them because I'm lazy.
Go like that. Or let's get a little crazier. I'm gonna throw some, like, new items in here. Let's go ahead and say, okay. I want my actuals.
I wanna see my, you know, trailing twelve months. So I can just say, hey. Let's grab June twenty three t twelve m, and maybe I want a year to date as well. So I'll just do June twenty three y t d.
Right? So you'll notice I didn't do any coding, anything like that. I literally just keyed in what I wanted in these columns, and Qube recognized it and pulled it right back. Right?
So super slick, super intuitive. It's all predicated on, hey. Whatever I stick in the rows and columns, as long as Qube recognizes it, it's gonna pull that back. So I can go ahead and stick this here.
Gonna pull my FTEs in. I can just type in FTEs, hit fetch, and now it's gonna go find my FTEs and pull them in. Again, no formulas, anything like that I have to worry about. So I have super easy, fast access to my data.
And And if somebody asks me for a for a report five minutes before a meeting now, I'm not freaking out or telling them they can have it tomorrow. I can quickly spin this up and have it at my fingertips for that meeting I'm about to walk into.
Now this is all great. I've got my twenty twenty three actuals. If I scroll out here to the right, I have three months of actual data. So my up model here is only updated through March.
So you'll notice I have nine empty columns out to the right here for then, you know, three plus nine months. But I do have budget that I've loaded into Qube as well or built out with Qube. So if I wanna pull in my budget into these empty columns here, I can just switch that header from actuals to budget, and now Qube's gonna go ahead and go find my budget numbers for the remainder of twenty twenty four. I could pull in my forecast as well.
But, again, no crazy coding, nothing like that. Qub is just simply using APIs to read the spreadsheet, whether I'm in GSheets or Excel. Go find that number and pull it back.
Alright? So this is great.
Jim, you're like, okay. I love this. This looks super easy to build a new report from scratch. I could pick this up.
But I have forty existing reports that I my team likes, they're used to. Do we have to scrap those and rebuild them? Great thing with Qube, the answer to that is no. If I come here, I have, like, a BBA report, you know, actuals versus budget versus prior year.
Same thing, kinda my p and l accounts going down the rows, Salesforce metrics, HR metrics, whatever other SaaS metrics I wanna pull in. But Qube hasn't seen this report yet. All we have to do, and we'll ask you to do this the first, like, week we're live, is bring your report, and we just highlight it and tell Qube, hey. Go read this.
So that's what the select button does. It activates our APIs, and it's gonna go read the spreadsheet. So it says, oh, I see I've got, you know, my scenarios and time periods in the columns. My rows have my accounts.
And then I don't see department entity product market, but I know we have those. I just drop it in here as a filter. And now I hit fetch, and now Qube goes ahead and pings that database, pulls back that data. Now, okay, now I roll it forward a month to March.
Maybe I wanna look at this year to date. I can just have a spreadsheet formula in here saying, hey. If I use this YTD drop down, tag YTD on the end. No big deal.
Now it's gonna pull back my year to date values.
Now if this was your report, chances everything matches up perfectly on the first go round.
Hopefully, it's gonna happen, but probably unlikely. Right? There's gonna be naming convention, something like that that's off. What's great here with Qube is we do have this validate button, and that's gonna tell you everything in this template that Qube does not recognize.
Right? So in this case, I've got, five items, and I've got a couple variance columns. Those are just spreadsheet formulas. No big deal.
I can ignore those. Down here, these are headers for my various sections. I can ignore those. But my discount line is not pulling through.
So let's go do a quick search, and Qube's gonna tell me everything it doesn't recognize. I can search for it. Now I can find okay. It's called discounts, not disc.
So let's go ahead and just update that.
And now I can go ahead and hit fetch. And now these numbers should appear here. But, again, really easy for you to modify, add things to your reports. You're not gonna have to call us up.
Every time you wanna make a change, try it if I wanna add in my full year forecast. I can just type in forecast twenty four, hit fetch. Again, keeps getting up in the database. I'm assuming I typed in the right name for my forecast.
It's gonna go grab that number and pull it.
Now another question we usually get is like, okay. Great. But, like, as I'm getting going, how do I validate these numbers are right? Or I wanna dig into the details.
How do I go explore that? Super easy. I can click on any cell here. Right?
If I'm gonna go look at the seven point five million, and I can click on this drill down button. So if I'm pointing to an account that comes from, like, QuickBooks or NetSuite and I hit drill down, what Qubo is gonna do is it's gonna open up a new tab in this workbook.
Again, same in Excel and G Sheets. And it's gonna pull on every single transaction that makes up that number. My four what kind of business hierarchies, but it's also gonna bring in it's gonna bring in my core, what kind of business hierarchies, but it's also gonna bring in transactional details. Right?
So in this case, I have three. I have the memo, the code, and the date, but you'll probably have twenty. Right? You might have vendor, journal entry type, posting date, whatever it might be.
You can pull those in. But, yeah, you can, you know, bring in this brought back eleven hundred rows of data with a click of a button. So now I don't have to go back in the NetSuite to go validate that poll.
Excellent.
Cool. Yeah. Keep firing the questions in there. I'm gonna keep plugging away, and we can answer them at the end, as we go through here.
So this is all great, but how do we get here? How do we set this up so CUBE can go ahead and, you know, do all this cool stuff? Right? I'll give you a brief overview of this.
We can get into more details to get you comfortable here. But there's kind of two foundational aspects in our web portal that you're gonna use to manage your data. For one, is you set up the business hierarchies that you need and all the metrics that you want. And number two is we set and can build connections to your source systems that flow that data in.
So you can see here my standard model. I've got kind of my three statement, model, sales metrics, so on and so forth. I've got my departments or cost centers.
I can have tons of different scenarios. Right? Like budgets, forecasts, rolling forecasts, long range plans. I can lock those down so people can't change those once they've been created.
I have the ability to actualize my plans for me with cubes. I don't have to do that manually anymore. Super easy to spin up new ones, so on and so forth, time periods, so on, you know, as we go through. But as I go through, we can go deeper than this.
This is just my sample starting point. Here, I have a kind of another model that's purely dedicated to Salesforce data flowing through. Right? So we're, you know, booking in quotas.
I'm analyzing, like, my average days to close.
I can see things by my different products, my sales reps, my market segments, SMB mid market, my source. Is it inbound? Is it outbound leads that are coming through? What's the stage of my pipeline? So you can have, you know, different things you're slicing and dicing by. I have another model I'll just jump over to to show you some more SaaS items.
Right here, I have a big list of SaaS metrics and things that I'm tracking. Right? What's my inbound versus outbound leads? What's my conversion rates? I you know, just going through my churn, my upper renewal, my CAC, whatever it might be, we can have all these different metrics and plan by those where it makes sense. So we get all this back end structure set up so we can do all the analysis and planning that your team wants, and then we go ahead and build in our connections to our source systems.
And to show off an example here, I have, you know, some different data file uploads. Like, when we first get you up and running, we'll load your current year budget so we can do BBAs.
But the most important ones are the connections to your GL system, usually a system like a Salesforce, maybe bringing in data from, like, a Snowflake or data warehouse, whatever it might be for your team. But our connection does two things. One, it will load in the actuals, of course, and you can schedule that. So, hey, every morning at five AM before we get in the office, let's go grab the most recent actuals.
I also can run those on demand. So, specifically, if it's counting data and I'm closing the books and I wanna refresh my data seven, eight times throughout the day, I can go ahead and click on that. But if I go up click on this, the other thing we're gonna do is we're gonna resync with your structure to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Right?
The worst thing is when somebody adds in a new GL account and you miss it and it throws off all your reports.
No longer is that gonna happen. CUBE has a super nice mapping interface to manage those new items flowing through so we don't miss that new structure. So you can see here, Cube identified two new items in NetSuite. So I just go ahead and click on map.
And for those of you who are doing financial consolidation and have multiple entities on their own source systems, This is where you manage that mapping from your local chart of accounts into your global chart of accounts. But I can go ahead and say, hey. Let's hide all the ones we've already brought in, and here's a new account. I have a new utilities account.
Right? So if I was doing more of that consolidation, I can do, like, hey. Let's map that to my existing item in the global chart. Otherwise, if it's just a brand new account and I'm matching NetSuite or QBO exactly, I just click add, tell Orr to go, and I'm done.
It gives you a lot of peace of mind because super easy, super slick interface to manage the structure in these data loads. So you're not manually doing data extracts with formulas all over the place, and you misalign on your formulas and it throws it out off. That all melts away from your schedule. You use it import, and now all your reports are updated immediately.
So, hopefully, this back end looks intuitive and straightforward.
That was by design. We want you to be in the driver's seat of your models. We don't want you to have to hand the keys over to us to drive it for you. So So you'll get in here. You'll understand things very quickly. We do have a dedicated customer success team that will be able to answer questions when you're doing things the first time, so on and so forth. But in ideal state, you're often running this application on your own.
Alright.
Got about maybe fifteen minutes left. I'm gonna dive into planning now and give you a couple different flavors of some, you know, types of plans. And, Sarah, make sure that I remember to show off visualizations before we wrap up as well in terms of dashboards. But, what we're gonna do first is just a a sample, like, OpEx plan, and then we'll get into more SaaS specific ones as well. But what we're gonna do today in this example is I'm gonna update my forecast. We're gonna do a new forecast.
And I used cube to lock down and save off my previous one, which is called three plus nine. And then I duplicated it. So now I just have another one called forecast. So I'm down here in Excel.
Maybe I'm the finance person. I like to be in Excel. But I'm working with Sarah. Sarah doesn't even have Excel.
Right? She works primarily in GSheets. So what we did is we built a template for Sarah up in GSheets.
You'll see the sidebar is right here. Only difference between Excel and GSheets is it shows up as an extension that you turn on. But what this is gonna allow us to do is, first off, I didn't have to do any of the data prep. I just built this template, hit fetch, and Cube dropped in all of my actuals, all of my current plan data, and even gave me a year of history here.
And Cube did all the heavy lifting, getting that data in the right spot. So it actually allows me and my team to do forecasting more frequently because I'm not doing all that manual data prep, and I'm not doing any of the data collection. Because Sarah comes in, Sarah's like, guess what? We're gonna start renting an office space for the team in July.
It's gonna be ten grand a month. Right? We want the marketing team to work together. So she's doing all this in GSheets.
Super familiar environment for her. Now all she has to do is hit publish.
And what Kube is gonna do is gonna sweep through this GSheet template. It's finding any updates that she's made to the plan, and it's sending that back into the database in the cloud. And I'm gonna be able to see the impact of those results immediately. I don't have to do a single thing to gather those inputs.
I'm not copy pasting, moving data around. She hits publish, and I'm gonna be able to see the impact of that right away. So you can see those numbers went through. And I can come back down here to Excel because that's where I'm hanging out as a finance person.
I hit fetch, and there we go. Sixty k update.
I didn't have to do a lick of work. Right? Sarah just hit publish. I immediately see it.
Maybe I'm curious where she booked that. I don't even have to go to her G sheet. I just have another variance view by account. I can hit fetch, and I should be able to see that change.
There we go. Come through on my rent expense line. I even have a similar template here. So in Excel, I can refresh this data, and I should see right in my rent expense line here, it come through and land in this template as well.
So the key here is I'm not doing any of that manual work anymore, and I get to see impacts of changes immediately. So maybe I'm sitting in a meeting and somebody asked me, hey. What if we do x y z, Jim? I can just do that change and see that, you know, the impact immediately.
I'm not having to get back to them tomorrow.
So really cool from that perspective. So this can be more of, like, standard OPEX headcounts.
You know, I won't belabor headcounts since this is more SaaS, but, you know, anything you can kind of imagine from a standard headcount planning methodology, we have that as well so you can bring in your roster. But let's go look at more of a SaaS specific kind of revenue planning model. So in this one, what we're doing is I have kind of a waterfall type approach here where I'm trying to get down to, hey. How much new revenue am I gonna be booking in based on how many deals I expect to close? The way I get there is I have an expected number of leads coming in from marketing.
What's my close percent on those by my different market segments? What's my average deal size? If we go further down this, I'm doing, you know, planning for churn and renewal and all that kind of good stuff as well. But we'll hang out up top.
And what's cool about this is a couple things. So number one, I mentioned before, you're not wrangling all the data from a historical perspective.
Right? Cube is dropping these numbers into these templates for us from our database. Right? We maybe we're pulling it in from Salesforce, so I'm not manually putting these numbers here anymore. I just open it up, hit fetch, and bring that data back. The other thing is I can use a mix of formulas. We call this kind of, like, a hybrid built like, modeling functionality.
So if I come here and go to my formula section, here you can see I have closed deals. Right? That's close percent times my number of leads. Bookings, that's my close deals times my average deal size.
Right? These are locked in formulas. I'm never changing them. They're always part of my process.
You can have see, I have, like, CAC and things like that baked in here. But what's cool is I can still use spreadsheet formulas, and there's gonna be times where I want to. Right? So in this case, I need to come up with a close percent for the mid market.
How am I gonna do that? I could just type in thirty one percent here. Or more likely, I'm using the history that cube dropped into this template. In this case, I'm doing a weighted average close percent.
I mean, the last three months, weight that fifty percent, six months, thirty, twelve months, twenty.
And that might be great, but I might make up on well, probably not tomorrow. I'm not working Saturday. I hope not. I'll wake up on Monday, and I wanna change that formula.
Great. I can just do that right in the spreadsheet. I'm not trying to, like, code all this stuff in the back end of a spread like, a a source system, anything like that. So if we go out here and say, okay.
We're doing our budget v three, and I wanna change some assumptions because I wanna make this like an upside scenario. So let's bump my close percent in the mid market up to thirty nine percent, and I just have, like, a formula that drags that forward. And in our enterprise market, I'm gonna change my average deal size to eighty k, give that a nice boost. Now I'm gonna hit publish, and I used two form or Excel formulas or g sheets formulas here.
But now it's cranking through those back end formulas I just showed you in our web portal, and it's doing those locked in formulas I have. But now if somebody if Sarah asked me that in a meeting, Jim, what happens if we close up our close percent and upper average deal size? I don't have to get back to her tomorrow. I can just say, well, Sarah, that means, you know, in the mid market, we're gonna sell eighty seven more deals.
That means three point one million more in revenue as of a corresponding implementation revenue, amount. And, actually, I need to hire four more people next year if we hit that plan because of this increased capacity or demand.
Right? And that's because I have a formula back here saying how many implementation managers do I need that's gonna be based on, like, my expected dollars around that and a capacity assumption that I plugged in.
Enterprise, all I did was change the price. So, you know, my average price went up. My bookings went up. That'd be great if we could just increase our prices and volume didn't go down. But this is an upside scenario, so we'll leave it that way for now. But, hopefully, it gives you a good flavor for how you can use cube for more of this revenue modeling or any modeling for that matter. Like, you can take those more baked in, locked in formulas, throw them in the back in the cube, but you have that flexibility to use spreadsheet formulas at will.
And keeps dropping all the history in because usually the most time consuming parts, not that one formula in the middle. It's getting the data in to get started and then collecting and comparing at the end against your previous scenarios.
So it keeps managing all that data flow for you, all those scenarios in the back end.
Couple other examples of some more SaaS focused or even sales focused in this case.
I can turn on Qube, and I've got, like, a lot of Salesforce data flowing in to give me analysis around performance of my sales team. So I'll turn on my cube for sales. This is all hooked up, and I here I have a report from doing quota attainment. It's kinda traditionally hard to get quota data in, you know, Salesforce.
Our team doesn't use it very reliably. Like, we pump all of our quota data into Qube. We have Salesforce data flowing into Qube, and then, you know, our sales leaders are analyzing that type of data behind the scenes. Same thing.
We can do, like, effective win rate. So I'm just saying, you know, fetch. We're pulling back that data.
We also view our data by, like, pipeline cohort. So if I'm looking at this, this is telling me, hey. I have had, you know, six hundred deals or opportunities come through. We want in q four of last or last year.
Right? So six hundred total opportunities came through. I won one hundred eighty seven of those that came through in q four. I lost four hundred eleven.
I still have nine active ones. Well, maybe I wanna go see what those nine active ones are. Again, we have this transactional detail button, drill down button. I can click on that, and it pulls back those nine opportunities.
So if I'm curious about, you know, what the opportunity name is out here, I'm curious about, like, the contact. I can see our sales rep who's assigned to this for each of them. So, like, who's really lagging? I can see Sarah's got three opportunities that came through in q four of last year.
What's going on with these? Right? But I can click on this these reports and get that extra layer of detail very quickly. And I'm not, like, going scrounging around looking for that.
Right? Another thing I might wanna do is maybe I wanna do some analysis around my my reps. Right? Who had the fastest, like, you know, close days to close last year.
Right? Because maybe they're doing something that nobody else is doing. So I can come in here and say, like, hey. Let's look at my average deals to average days to close, and we'll look at only opportunities that we won.
And I think this should pull back. We'll see in a second. Right? There we go.
And as I mentioned before, any kind of spreadsheet formatting you might wanna apply, I can go ahead and do that. So let's go ahead and and go like that and make it a little bit bigger. But now I can go ahead and say, okay. Let's go see who had the fastest average close, last year.
Okay. It was Phoebe, forty four days. So maybe Phoebe is an SMB rep, but that's expected. Or maybe she's not, and she can teach the the team something.
Here, I have Anthony, slowest. Right? Maybe he's, enterprise rep and it should take longer or not. Right?
So really quickly, I can dive into a lot of details in this data cuts coming through.
Alright.
Last example before I jump into visualizations, I have, like, a cohort model.
So if I come back into my hierarchies here right? So if I go to my cohort biz inc, right, you can see here I've got, you know, different metrics around my cohorts.
I'm analyzing almost by industry, but, of course, I have, like, different cohorts coming through.
Here's all my data for, like, the June twenty one cohort so I can analyze that. And so that allows us to do different reporting on that type of data. And, again, this is all hooked up to Qube, and I think this was I was just kinda showing my retention by cohort. But the key here is Qube is dropping all this data, and we're storing all of this to give ourselves lots of good, you know, kind of analysis, waterfall reports, whatever it might be that we need to do.
We can use this to forecast out. So I think I have my actuals going here. And then, you know, this one's a little bit dated, but I got starting November. I'm gonna start updating my forecast for a number of new users.
I'm using, you know, retention curves and things like that, blowing that in. Maybe I make adjustments to my curve, and I publish that in to compare different scenarios against each other. So tons of possibilities. A big takeaway I want for you is we just need to know the metrics you want to report on or plan against, the structures and hierarchies, the ways you cut and slice and dice that, and where we're getting the data.
And after that, you can kinda go go crazy in in this interface and build out any types of reports that you want. And to expand on that, I'll finish up with visualizations here. I'll go back to one of my initial the initial report. I bring it we'll bring it back full circle, how easy it was to set up one of these templates or views.
But in this case, I wanna build a new chart or visual. So I'm gonna say, hey. Let's go look at my, you know, east, west, and central markets by quarter.
And they do, you know, just those first two quarters. Right? So I'm gonna tell Q, hey. I added a second report section down here. Let's go ahead and add that in. Go read off of that.
Go refresh that. And now here comes my data, and I'm gonna insert a chart. Right? So go ahead and do that, and boom.
I get a chart. Might have taken me fifteen, twenty minutes before, but I just told Qb I wanted this level of detail, aggregated it for me, and I'm off and running. So what a lot of our customers do is they have to put together board decks. So we'll just have spreadsheets, whether it's in Google Sheets, connect to Google Slides, Excel, connect to PowerPoint.
Doesn't matter. The concept here is you have a table that's connected to cube your spreadsheet. In this case, it pointed to d forty four through t sixty three. I'm looking at that.
I can hit fetch. Cube's gonna go ahead and pull that data back into the template, update that. So now every month, I'm just flipping a month toggle.
Looks like I'm a year behind. Wrong March. Let's go to February just to to mix it up a bit. Refresh that.
So I'll update those first columns that are tied to that, update my charts, so on and so forth. So pretty much all of our customers are doing visualizations, board decks, things like that. But we do have really awesome dashboards as well to give your team more of that interactive visualization experience. Right?
So I come up here back to our cube web portal. It's kind of our first item here. And any kind of visualization type you might want, we have available at your fingertips to go ahead and build out. Of course, with the dashboard, the big piece is interactivity.
Right? Maybe I wanna go look at this for the last twelve months. Right? Any of these charts that are connected to one of these toggles will update when I make that selection, and it's gonna come back and pull back that data.
So if I'm looking at financial data, maybe I'm gonna look at it by department.
Give it a second to refresh. Of course, it's a demo, so it's gonna take a second.
But I can go toggle it in by department, market, entity, account, product. There we go. There's my departments, my markets, so on and so forth. You can top hover over these, get extra layers of detail. You can click on a component of a chart and click X-ray. When I do that, it'll break it down into, like, fifty minutei visuals. So I can go spot an anomaly really quick if I need to.
And you can have as many of these dashboards as you want. Right? So if I want, like, an exec team dashboard versus a department head dashboard versus a sales leadership dashboard.
Go crazy. You can have as many as you need from that perspective. So just to recap real quick. Right? We kinda showed you how easy it is to spin up reports from scratch. Again, you'd be able to pick that up in about fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes in terms of the interface because it's all just predicated on what what you stick in the rows and columns. It's gonna go ahead and pull back for you.
Showed you how we can connect to an existing report. Again, works the same in Excel or GSheets, walked you through the back end a little bit. Again, hopefully, it looked intuitive in terms of setting up your different structures, connecting into your data, mapping so nothing falls through the cracks on you. And then we went through various planning exercise to kinda show that off and some visualizations and dashboards.
So appreciate the attention that everybody gave. We can kinda open it up to the q and a. So if you haven't popped a question in there yet, feel free to do so. Otherwise, we can start running through those, right now.
Amazing. Thank you so much, Jim. So, yes, we got a number of questions coming in. I first one is, is there a limit to the number of dimensions or number of items in a dimension?
Good question. So, essentially, you have as many dimensions as you need because we can have as many cube databases as you need. So if you saw me popping back and forth between a few of those so as a best practice, we usually use about eight core hierarchies for the cube database. But, you know, usually, that's gonna break down by the different use cases you're doing. You saw one was, like, dedicated to Salesforce data versus maybe NetSuite data for financials.
So those are kind of our our guideposts for, you know, optimal performance and usability for your team.
Awesome. Thank you.
There's a few, sort of how do I work with other departments questions. So one of them is, can you limit the access Yes.
Let me pull that up real quick. It's super easy and intuitive to manage that. So I'll share. We have we call it our team section here.
So if I was gonna add in Sarah, I could, you know, hit new, choose what type of user is she. Is she an admin, like a budget or a view only? And then within that, I can dictate what she has access to. So maybe Sarah does not get access to the HR details, so I can turn that off for her.
And then maybe she only gets to see, you know, sales and marketing departments. So when she logs in, it'll authenticate who she is, what she she has access to. And then when she's interacting with the reports and planning templates, it's only letting her see and publish to those data intersections she's supposed to.
And, similarly, in somewhat the same vein, is is there an easy way for people to see which departments have actually updated their numbers via cube?
Yeah. Yeah. So if we go back to those templates I was showing. Oops. Let me share my screen again. Should just keep it up.
Couple things you can do. One is, we do have have, like, the ability of kinda bringing some workflow features. I didn't actually hit the I've started piece, but you can see right here that maybe we're two days out from the forecast being due, and only one person's updated that in the marketing department. So maybe I need to get on the horn and start telling people to go update their forecast.
But you can have, like, hey. I wanna go ahead and, you know, give Jim an update. I'm working on this or, actually, I'll submit this one.
That way, he knows I'm done and can go and view that. So now, you know, higher level, I can come in and see, okay. Like, okay. Jim's finished with his. But, again, nobody else has started there, so I've I've got bigger problems to to talk through at the moment here.
Awesome.
Next question. Is there a way to integrate one cube database to another? For example, sales cube to finance cube, or is it all in one large cube database?
No. You have the ability they're separate, like, mini database as much like a lot if anybody's used other platforms in the past.
Queue based solutions, you have the ability to send data back and forth to these solutions very easily. So no problem there. It's not all just in one massive table because, ultimately, if you're doing a p and l, you don't want sales reps sitting there because there's no data on your expense accounts per se tied to your sales reps. So best practice to kinda keep them in their own little databases, but you can if you're doing your revenue plan, you can send that those final revenue numbers over to the p and l very easily.
Great. Is it typical to have to work with a consultant when you're onboarding Qube?
Yes. You'll work with a member of the Qube implementation team.
Everybody is in house here at cubes. You're not dealing with third parties. But our goal is to get you in the driver's seat as quickly as possible. Our team is mainly setting up the back end structures, connecting and loading in your data and tying it out initially.
But then we're teaching you how to manage that. Right? So I showed before a new account flowed in. That's something you're gonna be able to manage on your own.
You'll be able to refresh the data as you often as you want. You can build as many reports as you want. So we have a heavy emphasis on training after we get your data connection set up. That way, you can be running with your own reports and things like that.
So, yes, you'll be working with our implementation team to get stood up, and then you'll be working with our customer success team moving forward just so you have that that lifeline, that resource. You want somebody to bounce an idea off of or have a question.
Hey. It's the first time I'm doing adding a new formula by myself. Can you help me out? Perfect.
Yeah. Let's jump on and sort through it. Otherwise, we do have a fantastic knowledge base. I know I'm a person who likes to go peruse the materials myself before I go ask somebody.
You obviously can ask right away too, but we have a really great knowledge base detailing the ins and outs of how everything works as well.
Yeah.
Shameless plug for our help center, which is excellent.
So, next question. Can Qube pull data from various files in a local p drive, that's accessible to everyone on your team?
Yes.
So that's a big thing that's different about Qube. Other applications that might be having Excel add in, they force you to go to their, their web page to go access templates.
With Qube, all the files you saw me working on are just, like, on a shared network folder. It could be a g drive, anything like that. So in terms of accessing your reports, you can continue to distribute them however you'd like. And then in terms of bringing data in, we can grab data from anywhere on any of your drives as well, if we're just doing, like, a simple upload of a budget or anything like that. So whether you want to store the formal reports that come out as outputs a cube, anywhere you want, you can, and we can grab data from files anywhere you might have them as well.
And then if we've kinda mentioned multiple users before. But if multiple users are using the platform at the same time, does that affect anything when it comes to real time entry?
No. The only thing in all every FPNA application I've worked with behaves this way is if two users happen to be updating the exact same cell at, like, the same time, whoever hit publish last would be their number would show up. But if Sarah and I are working on completely different departments, datasets, things like that, we're not gonna be, like, if I'm working on the finance department and she's in marketing, there'll be no conflict. It would just be if we were both entering rent expense for marketing at the exact same time.
You know, that would be the only item. But that that's pretty much the behavior of most of these applications that are out there. But we do have an awful audit trail. I didn't show it before.
But that way, you can if, like, if you're like, what happened? Like, I don't see the change I just made. I can go visit that audit trail, and I can see that one of the changes I just made. So we'll come back here.
I think this was one of them. Right. Here's that rent expense. Right? So I can see okay.
Sarah made an update at twelve twenty six central time to rent for forecast for July. She went from zero to ten thousand, and Sarah was in Google Sheets on this exact file, on this exact tab when she made that update. And so in those off cases where two people happen to be doing that, you can go check out the audit trail. But that's just a great resource for traceability, transparency as well, throughout your process.
Perfect. We only have one final question, and then I will make some more shameless plugs, which is what is the licensing structure? Is it by site or by named users?
Yeah. So there's generally a platform fee. You can see on our website, we've got, like, the different options. It's usually dictated by what ERP you're on because that's a good indicator for us of expected complexity and data volumes and things like that that we'll need to host.
Aside from that, additional charges for, by user and additional connectors you might be adding on. So you can work with a member of our team based on what you're curious about bringing into Qube and what that would look like. And we you don't always have to directly connect into a system. You can load data from flat files as well because sometimes people just have metrics that are just stored in the GSheet somewhere.
So you can get that easily into cube as well along with direct connections into systems like NetSuite, QBO, Sage, Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever it might be.
Perfect. Well, Jim, thank you so much. Like I said, a few resources.
If you are looking for a more custom experience, I've already sort of said Jim and his team are absolutely fabulous, if you are looking for that more custom experience and have additional questions. Additionally, we do have a newsletter, biweekly, from our CEO and former three time CFO, Christina Ross. That is packed with lessons from a lot of people within our own customer base as well as, experience with external folks that she interviews as well. And then finally, we have a community about eight hundred plus finance folks, in their strategic finance pros.
Always chatting, perfect place to sort of bounce ideas off of, safe space to sort of look for additional job opportunities.
And so we'd love to have you. And, again, thank you so much, everyone, for being here. We really appreciate it. There will be an email coming out with this recording, as well as, slides, and a perfect place to ask us different additional questions if you have them. Awesome. Jim, thank you so much.
Awesome. Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, everyone.
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