See Cube Live: How to get unstuck and start driving strategy

Video Transcription

Hello, everyone.

Thank you so much for coming to C cube live today.

Before we get started, just gonna go over a couple of quick housekeeping items. So first is our live q and a. You're probably gonna have a lot of questions throughout this demo webinar. We encourage you to put them down in the q and a section at the bottom of your screen. We have Taylor Josephs, one of our cubers here to answer questions as they come in. And then we'll also have some time reserved at the end to answer questions as well. So make sure you make use of that chat function.

And then next, the recording and slides. Everything you see here today is being recorded, and we're going to send you the full recording along with the full slide deck to your email after the presentation is over. So be sure to keep an eye on your inbox for that.

And without further ado, I'm going to introduce Jim Bullis, our host for today.

Jim is the head of solutions consulting here at Qube and knows Qube like the back of his hand, so I'm excited to hand things over to him and get things started. So, Jim, I will stop sharing my screen and hand things over to you.

Right.

Fire this up here.

Welcome, everybody.

And just a quick note before we get started, this is actually the follow-up session to a strategic framework session we did, a couple weeks back. So if you haven't checked that out, feel free to go, you know, review that recording as well. It's less cube specific, just more rolling out our strategic finance hyper hierarchy and how we conceptualize how finance teams should attack their day to day problems to get more efficient and more insightful.

So go check that out. It it's not like a three part movie series or anything like that where you've had just seen it before. This is it could be a good session regardless, but we'll just re real quickly talk about why strategic finance is is more important than ever, review that strategic finance hierarchy of needs that we rolled out last time, and then majority of the session will be shown how Qube can help you with your your processes. So I'll be doing a live demo.

So as we get into it real quick, you know, strategic finance, more important than ever as the agenda side said. Right? Why? Right?

Finance is being asked to move from being, you know, traditionally what we call, like, a scorekeeper to more of a strategic partner of the business. Right? So in terms of what leadership is being tasked with, right, we've always had to explain, you know, what happened, why did it happen, do that BBA analysis. But, really, a lot more emphasis is being placed now on, hey.

What's going to happen? What's happening next? How do we make the best decisions as an organization? And the finance team is kinda sitting in the middle of that, helping facilitate those discussions, providing the right datasets, whatever it might be to arrive at those decisions.

Now the problem with where most finance teams are is they're really stuck being what we would call more tactical, which is obviously very important, but it's it's not as much of the strategy or strategic aspect as we would like to be. So what's that mean? Right? They're operating more in the short term short term being a little more reactive.

They're they're struggling to have the time to go, you know, communicate the proper narrative, which is kinda hindering your stakeholders and department heads understanding of the business. It's tough to garner support and alignment because we're we're operating in silos, right, which limits that collaboration.

Right? So what that means is when we are being more tactical, less alignment between our overall organizational objectives. Right? Maybe that one three five year plan to the day in and day out, like, maybe budget or forecast that we're working on.

Right? We wanna make sure those are aligned. And, generally, we're viewing finance as a cost center, kind of ignoring the value creation we can bring. Right?

So what we're trying to get to, I'm sure most of you on this call, right, we wanna be thinking more long term. We're gonna be crafting compelling narratives to collaborate with our team across those departments to build that business strategy versus being in those silos.

We want to align those strategies from finance team with those organizational goals. And then, you know, finally, hopefully, in finance is helping facilitate revenue growth as opposed to just, you know, the cost aspect of it. So why are most teams we talk to not as strategic as they want to be?

That's gonna be because we're not, you know, making this shift. And it's really not a capability. Like, everybody on this call is capable of becoming more strategic. It's really a capacity constraint.

Right? Teams are stuck in the weeds, and they're not being able to shape those business decisions and drive that strategy. So, you know, we're in the data, wrestling with the numbers, we're doing extracts and v book ups and some ifs all over the place, trying to bake bring together my HR data with my financial data, with my CRM data, whatever it might be. Right?

We're stuck in reporting cycles. Right? We're we're rushing to close the books. We're spending days and days to get those reports out as opposed to, like, diving in and analyzing, the numbers themselves.

And then finally, when it comes to projections, right, we're stuck maintaining these massive models that take five minutes to open in Excel and might have one formula off that screws up the whole workbook. Right? So we're we're maintaining these these spreadsheet models. I remember working with one customer seven they had, like, point seven five and a have an FDE was just maintaining their spreadsheet model.

Right? So that's not being strategic. That's not analyzing. That's not doing what ifs. Right? So what Cube has done to help teams conceptualize and figure out how to attack their problems and, you know, become a more efficient team is we've rolled out the strategic finance hierarchy of needs.

So I'll pop open what that looks like. Right? It's kind of this foundational pyramid.

And we've got four distinct layers in here that we'll we'll go through in detail during the demo. But first is getting the data management. Right? It's really tough to do anything above data management, your reporting, your planning, if the the numbers aren't, you know, bring coming in the way we need them to. Right? So we get data management. After that, we can generate the reporting analysis we need.

After that, we can begin to plan and model effectively and quickly, which ultimately unlock unlocks our ability to be more strategic around those goals. So before we get into demo, like, what does each of these mean? In more detail, we'll start with data management.

Right? There's kind of three pillars we think about. There's consolidation.

Right? Bringing data together, you know, a lot of times from multiple systems. You know, maybe I need to report on FTEs alongside my financial data with sales data coming in from my CRM system.

There's the cleansing of it. Right? Is it accurate in our source system before it gets to my reports? And then governance. Right? Building out processes to make sure that the team is driving an effective strategy around their data to make sure it's coming through in the right way. So getting that foundational layer in place is really important.

Next up is gonna be reporting. Right? We've got all that data. We need to publish our kinda mandatory reports.

Right? Our monthly reporting package, quarterly reporting book, board decks, dashboards, whatever it might be. But, ultimately, we wanna analyze that data, determine what it's telling us. Right?

You know, I always go back to the the title financial analyst.

Right? The keyword there is analyst. It's not financial report creator or, you know, spreadsheet, you know, formula writer. Right? That's part of your job. But, ultimately, we wanna be using that human brainpower to unlock insights to help drive the business.

Next up, planning and modeling.

And these can mean different things to different people. In general, planning, those are my regular, you know, cadenced forecast and budget cycles. And modeling is my mechanisms to go execute those. Like, what are my drivers?

What are my assumptions? What are my rates that are gonna help me build out those tactical plans? Finally, we do all that. We're able to, you know, spend our time driving strategy, being more effective with our conversations with our stakeholders, working collaborative collaboratively.

If we don't have these, you know, bottom layers in place, we just don't have the time in the calendar to go do that. So we've built this out as a framework for you to think about your team, your departments, and how you can, you know, address and, you know, diagnose where you're at in each of these stages. And, ultimately, here at CUBE, we've built Qube out to help finance teams across that pyramid in a lot of the different ways that, you know, eat up a lot of time and prevent you from being really strategic. Right?

So so what is Qube and how are we gonna help out with that?

Qube is the first spreadsheet native FP and A platform. So what we're trying to do is we wanna meet you and your team where you wanna be. Right? We have great web based assets, dashboard, and so on and so forth to, you know, consume your data there and interact with the data there.

But we find that finance teams generally love to work in spreadsheets. So we have a universal patent pending spreadsheet connector that allows us to bring your data in and out of spreadsheets. It could be Excel on a Mac, Excel on a PC, Excel online. We work with Google Sheets as well as you'll see throughout the demo, but that's gonna give you a lot of power and flexibility to approach your processes.

And I personally have worked with, I think, six FP and A applications all the way back to TM one fifteen years ago when I started in this space. And they were great great platforms at the time, but we're in twenty twenty five. We have newer tech available. So So what cubes can allow you to be and have is the most flexible, scalable solution to approach these problems.

Right? When I talk to finance teams, a couple things they always say is, number one, can I run this thing on my own? Right? In the past, I would say no.

You have to use consultants to stand this up for you, maintain it. Number two, is it easy to change when my business changes? Right? We work with a lot of growing organizations who are constantly changing the way they plan and model and report.

Right? So can keep help you there. And then finally, can I make my reports look the way I want to? And because we're you know, have that great spreadsheet interface, Keap's gonna give you the flexibility to model, layout, and format your reports however you need, and we'll showcase that in the demo today.

So last slide here before we get into the the demonstration.

This is kind of the data flow. We have our cube database in the cloud. In the middle here, what we're gonna do is we're going to connect into whatever source systems you need to execute your finance team processes. Right?

So here I've got my my ERP, my CRM, my HRIS. We connect into data warehouses. We connect into just, you know, raw flat files if you have data you need to pump in. But then you're gonna be able to access that wherever and however you need it.

Right? That's in the web interface. Great. That's gonna be right in your spreadsheets where you're doing your modeling and your reporting and distributing out to your team.

That's great as well. So we'll show you what that looks like here. And, again, we're gonna frame this up through the lens of that hierarchy of needs. So we're gonna start with that bottom layer, data management, and show you how CUBE can help and how we get things structured and stood up in the back end.

So let's go. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open up our cube web portal.

Now this is where a model administrator is gonna come in to manage your hierarchies, load your data, add formulas into the system, whatever it might be. My big takeaway for you is that this should look really easy and intuitive to manage when it comes to those hierarchies, those data flows. Right? We built Qube with the finance team member in mind, not needing to spend six months in training to run this thing in the back end.

End. So what we see here is we've got our key web portal. And the first thing that we're looking at is our dimensions. So these are our business hierarchies that you're going to be able to slice and dice your data by.

When you just do a dump into a spreadsheet, right, you're manually having to create pivots and things like that.

In your spreadsheets, here I have all these hierarchies and cubes seem to be doing that data consolidation for me. Right? So I've brought in maybe my three statement model from a system like NetSuite, but I'm also connected in and consolidating and creating that central source of truth with data from maybe Salesforce, maybe my HR system, Paylocity, ADP, whatever it might be, Bamboo. I have KPIs from other systems, but I have it all in one central location.

I'm confident that the data is flowing incorrectly, and I'm not missing anything, and Qube is doing those consolidations for me. So when we think of that data management layer, solving a lot of the the problems and and heartache that you currently suffer today by bringing it into a FP and A platform to manage this data for you.

Now we have a bunch of different ways you can slice and dice your data. Right here, I have it by departments, you know, my different scenarios, actuals, budgets, forecast. We'll come back and talk about that when we plan. Time periods, right, going down through the quarters into months.

This can match your fiscal calendar, right, if you start your year in February or July or whatever it might be. And then we can handle multi entity consolidations as well. Here I have some examples like product and market that I wanna slice and dice by later, but gives you that power and flexibility to manage, consolidate that data, roll it up your hierarchies. Now you can also have alternate hierarchies.

For example, if I come to my department here. Right? I've got, you know, my department's rolling up into functional areas like sales and marketing, g and a. But if you're like Jim, that's great.

But I also have to create reports, so I roll it up by manager. Or this is our current department structure, but we did a reorg last year. Can I look at it with in the re pre reorg view?

Yes. That's what these tags will do inside a cube. These are essentially alternate roll ups or alternate hierarchies. So you can come in here and see that I've got, you know, maybe Joe's team down here.

Joe oversees professional services, sales, and customer success. Those don't fit into our functional roll up, but I've created that alternate roll up in the back end of Qube, which is gonna give me a lot of power and save a lot of time on my reporting interface. We also see customers that do this with, like, accounts. Maybe you have a management view versus a gap or accounting view.

Right? You can run both with Qube to generate those reports.

Lastly, in the back end, we're going to calculate things for you that you need calculated.

You can update those via formulas, but I've got a great example right here, which is gross margin. You can see that's being calculated via formula. And And over here, I can see a really simple syntax, revenue minus COGS. Right? That's gonna spit out gross margin value for me so I don't have to worry about that in my reports anymore.

So that's kind of our first data management piece is bringing together the structure I need to save all that time rolling the data up. I'm consolidating and bringing data from multiple sources, and I'm gonna manage those source, loads or connectors here. So here you can say I've loaded in some historical data or, like, payroll data via just a flat file, but I have connection NetSuite, Salesforce, whatever systems I have bringing data into Qube. I'll see those listed out here.

And I can simply, you know, schedule this. So every morning, for example, five AM before the team gets in the office, Qube's gonna go ping NetSuite or Sage Intacct or whatever my source system GL is, bring that data in. I can also run it on demand. Right?

So if it's month end closed and I wanna refresh the data throughout the day as people are booking entries, cool. I can just click import. But the other really slick thing that we're gonna do for you is we're gonna check for new structure. Right?

A new account, a new department, a new location code, a new project code, whatever your, you know, hierarchies dictate. You are no longer gonna have to, like, hunt and pack or remember and then find out that you forgot something and your reports off because you missed that one new account. Right? You can see here Qube's like, hey.

I found two new items. Let's go bring those into Qube the way we want to. So I click on that mapping screen.

What Qube's gonna do is it's gonna show me my chart of accounts as it exists in my source system and then how I'm mapping it into Qube. So for most customers, if you have, like, a NetSuite, it'll just be one to one, and we'll just tell, hey. Go add it in. But we do have customers that are consolidating from multiple GL systems into a master chart of accounts.

That's where you'll manage this as well. Let's just go click on my unmapped accounts, and it looks like I have a new checking account. Right? So I could go map that into my existing cash account if I wanted to, or I could go add that new account into the structure.

And now I'm confident that nothing's slipping through the cracks on me. So, again, that data management layer, really critical to building that strong foundation.

Cube's gonna help you immensely with that by managing your data, bringing it all into one spot, checking for new structures so nothing, you know, slips past you and give you the power to calculate and aggregate maybe items that are not in your GL system.

So let's just pop back here real quick. So we touched on data management, building that foundation. So we're trying to get you away from drowning in that data, drowning those spreadsheets to moving to creating those actionable insights.

So let's take a look at what that looks like. We got this strong data layer in place using Qube as a platform. So let's go generate some reports and analysis.

And my favorite way to interact with Qube is to do a report from scratch and ad hoc analysis. So this could be what it looks like for you and your team if you're just spinning up a new report or maybe, hey. Somebody asked me a question, and I need to get an answer back to the CFO right away. Right?

This is what you'd look like if you had cube, at your disposal cube. So I fire up a spreadsheet. I'm gonna start in Excel. As mentioned, we do work the same on PCs as we do on Macs with Excel.

We also work with GSheets. So one of the next few exercises, I'll do something in GSheets. But just to note, the experience is identical across all those interfaces, and so there's no different clicks or anything like that you have to worry about. All you do is I came in here, turned on queue, and it's ready to go.

So this sidebar within my spreadsheet is gonna go talk to our database. So I'm gonna go build a new report.

And that data management layer, we brought in data from three systems, probably more. I'm gonna pull in OPEX from maybe NetSuite. I'm gonna pull in, my FTP account from Bamboo, and then I'm gonna go pull in some bookings data from Salesforce.

As I go through this, this should look really intuitive and easy. Most of our customers kinda pick this up and run with it in fifteen minutes or so once you show them how it works. So I just click on new, and those same hierarchies I just walked you through are gonna show up here in the sidebar. And, again, these hierarchies will be custom to you.

Right? So if you have projects or customers or locations, whatever it is, you'll see those listed here. But let's go build that report. So I'm gonna drag my account into the rows really easy.

And then I have all those accounts and metrics that I showed before available. So let's go dig into my p and l of paying operating expenses. Let's go ping my sales metrics. I'll grab my bookings, and I'll just grab my FTEs from my HR system.

Nothing crazy. Just a couple clicks.

Let's pull in two years. I'll pull in twenty four and twenty five.

And let's just throw my scenarios up top, and we'll look at actuals to get going. Right? Nothing crazy. A couple drags, couple drops.

Now I hit add other dimensions. I hit fetch.

And what's magical about this is Qube creates the structure of that report, and then it's gonna go ping the database and drop all those numbers in there for me. So within a few seconds, I have a report that's showing two years of data. I've got all my operating expense accounts from NetSuite. I've got CRM data from Salesforce or whatever it might be.

I've got my FTE count coming in, but I don't have to do any manual extracts, the lookup, some ifs, index matches. In fact, you'll notice there's no code, no formulas, no syntax of any sort in here. That was always a big feedback I heard from finance teams is like, I don't wanna learn all this this new proprietary code coding language or have a a bunch of hidden rows and columns that are generating this report, or some systems I've worked with in the past have this long prehistoric formula that looks like a v lookup with some if. Like, those are the formulas we're trying to get away from.

Right? What Qube is doing, it's using APIs to talk with the spreadsheet. So if I accidentally delete all these numbers, no big deal. I just hit that fetch button again, and Qube is gonna use APIs to talk to the database and just go pull those back based on what I'm looking for there.

So really powerful. I've brought together those three datasets into one view. But what's great is I'm in a spreadsheet.

And if you're like me, I'm gonna clean this up a little bit, put some polish on it before I send it out to the team. Right? You already know how to do that. Right?

I can just go insert some blank rows. This is all just spreadsheet muscle memory. Right? I'll throw some bolding on here to make it look nice.

Maybe I don't need the quarters. I could have untoggled those, but I'm lazy. So I'll just delete out the quarters manually here. I'll throw, like, a blank column in between the years.

Now other applications I've worked with, if I were to do those types of operations and hit fetch, it would wipe away all those edits I made. Qube honors and respects those. Like, we built it knowing that our customers are going to want to do these types of things, add in spaces and bolds and all that kind of good stuff. So Qube just hangs out over it. And when I hit that fetch button, it reprocesses it and just brings the numbers in where they're supposed to be with the formatting I've added. So your ability to get up and running and build your own reports, there's no forty hour training you have to sit through. Again, fifteen minutes in, you're building your own reports because we've centralized that data for you.

One more thing to do here is I wanna go add some aspects into this report. Right?

He built it out for me, and that was a great starting point. But maybe I wanna go see actuals, and I wanna pull in, like, year to date.

And maybe I don't even wanna see, like, a trailing twelve month.

Right? I literally just type those in, hit fetch, and Keeps can go look those up for me. Like, normally, I would have to go add in a formula for the year to date for the trailing twelve month. I don't have twelve month of data in this view, but that's in the database behind the scenes.

So I'm just telling Keap, hey. Go grab that for me and pull it in. Or maybe I wanna see my FTEs up here a little bit. Right?

Down there down at the bottom. I can just type in FTEs, hit fetch. Cubes can go ping the database, pull my FTEs in there. So your ability to quickly access and, you know, put your numbers where you want them in your template, I've never had anything this fast and easy and intuitive to play with in terms of getting these reports out.

So we brought in three datasets so far into this report. Let's go bring in a fourth, which is in this model, I don't have actuals for twenty five yet, but I do have my budget that we created. So I wanna ping the twenty twenty five periods and just go bring in my budget. I didn't do have to do anything crazy. I literally just changed that top row to say budget instead of actuals.

Now I'm just gonna refresh again, and I'll just preemptively, you know, make the columns a little bigger. So when the data flows in, I don't see those number signs or whatever it is. But real quickly, I've just told you, hey. Bring in more my budget data.

I could bring in, like, my total forecast, whatever it is for any given period. Really fast, really easy. Just again, it's intuitive. Whatever you would want to show up, just, you know, tell Qube, hey.

That's what I want in this row or column, and it'll go grab it for you.

So this was me firing up a report from scratch. Again, this is my favorite way to start because I've never had anything this fast or easy before. But a lot of our customers come to us and say, hey, cube team. We've got our own reports that our team is used to today.

We don't wanna, like, have to redo everything. Right? I know that it was easy to do, but can we just use what we have today? That's a big difference for Kube as well.

Like, in this case, I'll go up to GSheets, and we'll pull up, like, a BBA report.

What's great is we don't make you ditch what you're doing today. Cube, again, wants to meet you where you are. So you can see I've just got a simple, like, BBA report, actuals versus budget versus prior year.

Cube is turned on in GSheets the same way it was in Excel.

All I have to do to take your existing report that's in your layout, your spacing, your font, your colors, everything like that, is you just highlight the section that's gonna have data.

You tell Qube, hey. Go read this.

So Qube will, you know, evaluate those rows and columns, and it'll detect, hey. I see scenario and time in the columns. I see my rows in the accounts. I don't see department or entity or product or market. So I'll just leave those as a filter. But as quick as that, I've hooked QubUp to your report. We can get rid of all the lookup formulas and index matches, and Qub's dropping those numbers in.

So really, really slick because we can kind of just attach ourselves to your process and just automate your reports. Because now I can just come in and, you know, flip this to April and then hit fetch. Qube will go reprocess the report, bring in just my April data.

Now when we do this with our customers, the chances of everything matching up perfectly on the first go, probably pretty low. Hopefully, it does for you. But we do have this validate button built in. What that's gonna do is it's gonna check the report for anything that a cube does not recognize.

So you can see I've got six items in here. You know, these are just kinda headers for, like, a variance row. I think these are header down down below. But if we take a look, like, hey.

It doesn't recognize what's in c seventeen here. I can just do a quick search to see what it's actually called inside cubes. I can see, okay. This is called discount.

Let's just, you know, update that. Now it should be synced in with cube. I can go back and, you know, go ahead and hit fetch. And now Qube should go and ping the database, and it should pull in my discount numbers now that I have that name correct. So really, again, slick that you can just quickly sweep through it, identify anything that's off, and correct that. Now my report's good to go.

As an end user, I have a couple cool things I can do besides just refresh the data. First, if I'm interested in what makes up this number, like, I'll do my actuals here, I can click drill down on that cell. And what Qube's gonna do, it's gonna open up a new tab in my workbook, could be in Excel, could be in GSheets, and pull back every transaction that makes up that data point. So I'm gonna pull back this two point three seven million.

Every transaction, in this case, from NetSuite that makes up that two point three seven million.

So if I just go expand that a little bit, I can see my various queue hierarchies. I should be able to see that it equals two point three seven million down here in the right, but I also have some transactional fields. Right? I've got my memo, my code, my dates.

Right? You'll probably have twenty of those, journal entry type, hosting date, vendor, whatever is relevant for you at that detailed level. But I just pulled in how many is this? Almost four hundred records of data at the click of a button.

Again, that comes back to that data management foundation.

I'm not, you know, swimming in the weeds of all that data in Excel anymore or having to do extracts out of NetSuite. I just click that button. I have it right at my fingertips. It's keeping me fast. It's keeping me nimble.

The other thing we can do is we can filter into this report. Right? So I drill down on a number, but maybe I just wanna see this data for the UK entity. Right?

I can go ahead and hit fetch. The cube's gonna reprocess this just for my UK entity. And right now, I'm looking at it in US dollars. We do have multicurrency capabilities.

So if I wanted to go look at this in pounds, I could go look at it. I could look at it in euros if I wanted to. Whatever, you know, currencies I've activated within Qube, we can use to go analyze and refresh our data.

So really awesome there. I can show kind of two examples. You know, spinning up a report from scratch, you know, hooking on to one of your existing reports. We do have a very robust library of templates.

So if you're just starting up and you're like, I don't have anything to use today or we hate our reports, we wanna start from scratch. Well, you don't have to build everything and format it in, like, a new way. You can take our starter templates as well and use that as a jumping off point if you like our colors, our our formats, or maybe just start it and change it to green to gray or whatever it might be. So trying to get you up and running as fast as you can, via this intuitive spot sidebar here.

So we'll come back and talk some more visualization options like dashboards and board decks a little bit later, but we're just gonna recap this real quick. Right? We're moving from being stuck in the weeds trying to generate our reports or having three, four day reporting cycles. One of our customers recently told us they used to take them three days to run their p and l's. Now they're down to, like, three minutes, I think they said, to just, like, attack their book and hit fetch fetch all reports, and it'll pull back all that data for them. Right? So we're trying to get you to automate those manual report books that you have and then give you that quick insight to do that ad hoc analysis as well.

So we got our data management in place, which allows us to report. We're saving all that time reporting.

Next up, planning and modeling.

Right? We're climbing you see the little stick man climbing up the pyramid here, moving on up to executing our forecast cycles. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna head back into our cube web portal, and I'm gonna come over to our dimensions.

And I'm gonna touch on our scenarios here. Right? So we mentioned before, right, I have my budget in the system. I have my actuals. You can see I have a bunch of different passes on my budget, my historical budgets. So you can have as many scenarios as you want within queue.

You can see I've got bunch of different forecasts down here. You can have rolling forecast, long range plans. When you start to become more strategic, you can do more of those things. Maybe you're moving from only doing a budget to a monthly reforecast now that you have the power of an application here.

But a couple of really important points when it comes to scenarios in a planning system. Right? First off, I wanna lock them down. Right?

That's what this indicates here. I've frozen my budget, so nobody can change it at this point in the year. Right? We finished that in December, maybe early January, hopefully not February for some of you.

But we've locked it down. It's frozen. Now I can reference it and view it, but nobody's changing it anymore.

Or the other thing we can do is, hey. I wanna fire off a new forecast. Maybe I know I'm about to head into a meeting where somebody's gonna be asking me, hey. What if we, Jim, what if we do x y z?

Well, I can be like, hey. Let's create a what if forecast. I'll make a copy of my existing forecast. I'll just call it, you know, what if.

I'll hit save. I'll have a fresh scenario sitting there for me. I can go play around with, and then I'll be able to create a report where I can compare that to my previous scenario and tell people what's changed.

Real quick, we can also actualize your plans. Right? That's what the scenario merge button does. That is usually a huge barrier in, you know, time suck when it comes to running reforecast is all the actualizations of, let's say, March.

Don't have to do that anymore. With cube, you can just say, hey. Let's go update my forecast with actuals for March. Right?

So I can come in here and just pick the right month. So as soon as we close the books on March, I can hit save. Now I'm doing a three plus nine. Took me almost no time to, like, do that data movement, just a couple clicks within queue.

Now real quick to talk about Qube's AI strategy.

We're trying to be really tactical and helpful for our customers and getting a lot of their feedback in terms of where AI can help. Right? Chatbots are great. You know, we have one coming out soon. But we started with a couple of features that our customers are getting a lot of value from. First off is what we're calling smart forecasting.

This is essentially using the history we've loaded into Qube. Again, that data management layer coming to play here. Got a couple of years of history in a system. We're gonna use that to create a statistical projection using the trends and, you know, seasonality and history of your business to forecast out twelve, twenty four, thirty six, however many months you wanna go forward, and let Qube generate that for you.

Right? So a lot of our customers are using that as a starting point for the plan. Like, hey. What what's Qube's AI think we're gonna do?

I'll use that as my jumping off point. Or maybe you build your plan, and then you use it as a gut check against it to say, hey. What did Cube think we were gonna do? And then you can kind of say, oh, this these two numbers are off.

Like, and, you know, maybe you reconcile that and come to a new conclusion or update the plan, whatever it might be. So that's piece one from an AI perspective. The other, you can see it's new here, came out in the last month or so here.

Going back to that BBA we just showed in g sheets, like, half the BBA is getting the numbers in the right spot. Usually, bunch of time there. The other piece is explaining it. Right?

So we've built in what we call smart analysis, which will allow Qube to use AI to sweep through your your BBA and basically generate those analyses and come up with your big outliers right away. So in here, I can say, hey. Let's compare my actuals to my budget, and let's just go look at December of twenty five or four. So I'll go click on that and maybe anything above a five percent variance.

So now Qubes dot ai is sweeping through, and it's gonna call out my biggest, dollar variances and also my biggest percent variances. Like, looks like I have a huge one or percent wise in other income, but it might not be that big from a dollar perspective. I'll give you a little write up they can use to, like, get started. And then also give you the ability to dig into those variances to get even deeper insights.

Like, here, I just have revenue, but maybe I'll dive down one layer or maybe I'll look at it by product. Right? I can kinda start to see those variances sorted to give me that insight right away.

So customers saving a lot of time in their BVA variance explanation portion of their cycles.

Right? Cube gets the numbers in there, gives you some analysis to work off of, and hopefully saves you tons of time from that perspective.

Alright.

Let's go actually update that plan.

So what we're gonna do today is we've finished up our budget, and we're gonna go rerun our our our first new forecast of the year. Right? Maybe some things have changed.

And the key here is I'm gonna come into a template like this. So maybe you as a finance team might use something like this to monitor your process, and I'll just delete the numbers to show you there's no formulas or anything in here. But, essentially, this is a by department view comparing my new forecast against my prior budget. So let's just see where we're at so far, see if anybody's made any changes.

Okay. It looks like Taylor in accounting has gone ahead and, you know, booked in some, you know, changes to the forecast.

In this example, I'm gonna be the head of marketing, and I'm gonna go make some inputs and updates as well.

Now what's cool here is, normally, when I think about a planning cycle, like, it's time intensive throughout. But, like, the beginning and the end are especially time intensive. Like, here I have a template for the head of marketing.

I have the expense line items I want them to fill out. I had gave them a year of history for reference. I've got the plan time frame, right, the twelve months going out in the future. But I have to go get all those numbers and put them in the right spot.

Not with Qube. Right? I am in a spreadsheet. It's a friendly environment for my team.

I can just hit fetch or my user can hit fetch. Right? I can send them an empty template. They turn on their sidebar right in that formatted spreadsheet where I've highlighted and used color to, like, really emphasize what I'm looking for them to do.

But I have done none of the data wrangling that I need to to get this planning cycle started. So think about all that prep work you have to maybe do to get a forecast cycle kicked off. That all just goes by the wayside. You're just literally got the template you want.

You point in at the right things, and q does all the data work for you.

And in fact, for this example, let's go up to GSheets. So I'm gonna pop back up here.

And here I've got that same, you know, template. You know, I have, you know, last year's data in here as reference if I need it. Right? So I can expand and collapse that as an end user.

But I'm gonna come in. I'm the head of marketing. And guess what? We wanna run some office space for the team, so I'm just gonna plug in, you know, ten thousand dollars starting in June.

Right? I can drag that across all the way.

What's great about this is I'm the head of marketing. Maybe I don't even have Excel, but I also don't wanna learn some brand new interface to go interact with my numbers. Right? A G sheet is very comfortable for me. Right? I I work with them. I collaborate with G sheets.

Maybe it is an Excel sheet. Maybe you don't use two sheets. Either way, like, this is not an intimidating environment for somebody to go in and enter some numbers. And then all they have to do, and maybe I'll even put a note in here, new office space, is go ahead and hit this publish button.

So there's not time they have to learn, open a template, type in their numbers, hit publish. And now I mentioned those two areas that are especially time consuming, getting the data prepped for the cycle and then collecting and aggregating it. That publish button is doing that for you. So all that time you have to spend consolidating, aggregating these numbers, and then ultimately, Taylor comes in and changes something after you do that consolidation.

Now you have to rerun the whole process. You don't have to worry about that anymore. You can just be hanging back, checking out your, like, high level view, and you wanna see how things are going. And I refresh this, and I can see, okay, Jim and marketing's made seventy k worth of updates.

Right? No work on my end. That was entered in a g sheet. I'm viewing it down here in Excel.

Maybe, like, I wonder what Taylor updated. I could go open up her g sheet, or I could just go here. I have, like, a by account view. So you give as many, like, slices and aggregations of these this data as you want, and it all flows in in real time.

So as soon as somebody hits that publish button, you can see the impact of it immediately. You don't have to run, like, some batch process where it takes an hour for this data to move over. Right? I can see right away that Taylor or Jim updated the rent expense line, or I could even view it in this template here if I wanted to.

Right? I can come and see, you know, here's that ten k should show up, I think, in rent here. There it is. Right?

So now I'm in Excel. I can see that input. So I don't have to go tinker and go pull up people's templates anymore. As soon as they hit the publish button, I get access to all that data.

And we do track everything in an audit trail. Again, coming back to that data management layer. Right? I can come and check out that last update.

So I can see here March twenty fifth at twelve forty central time where I'm sitting. I work for Kyiv. This would say Jim here. He made an update called new office space.

And what he did is he updated rent for forecast for June for marketing. It was zero. Now it's ten thousand. Where was Jim?

Jim was in Google Sheets. Here's a link to this specific Google Sheet I was using, and here's the tab that I was working on. So every aspect of any change is logged in the back end of the system for your reference, for your auditability, and transparency from that perspective.

So really slick.

Having that ability to interact across your different templates wherever they may be, Macs, PCs, GSheets, Excel, doesn't matter. Qube's gonna facilitate your process for you and save your time across the board because, again, you're no longer prepping your files or consolidating data out of them. Qube is managing that process for you.

Awesome. Well, that was a really easy input. Right? I just plugged in ten k, drag it across.

What if I wanna get deeper? Right? I want my team to be thinking about their travel and, like, by trip. Right?

You can set up templates that give you the ability to enter in those detailed line items. The reason I don't have these notes columns in my main input screen is because these are all related to travel. From a real estate perspective, I've just pointed this to the travel account. But what Cube's gonna do here is you can see I've got, you know, all these notes.

Maybe I'll just, you know, update this to be three hundred thousand.

Right? But what I've told Cube via a button here, you can just say, hey. Grab these columns and tell Cube to pull those in. Because when I publish this data in, Qube is going to grab not only my, you know, numeric inputs, right, this three hundred k.

It's also gonna grab the notes for a conference in Texas. So I can reference that or pull it up at any point in any report. So we'll just pop back to our main page here, and you can see there's no formulas linking my tabs anymore. And if I refresh this, I should see kind of five thousand going across all the months here and then three hundred fifteen k show up in what was that?

August.

Now what's awesome about this is I use that drill down button on actuals before to pull up my transaction detail from a system like a NetSuite or Sage, whatever it might be. I can do the same thing on budget or forecast data. So I can click here and click drill down, and Qube's gonna pull back the four line items from that input screen. And I can see instantly, like, oh, you know, this big expense here is from a conference in Texas.

You know, I thought when we talked about that was thirty k, not three hundred k. Right? Did Jim just bad finger an extra zero in there, or does he actually wanna spend that? You get insight to that immediately upon a click and drill down versus having to go give Jim a call and figure out what he was entering or whatever it might be.

Alright.

One more planning piece to to hit on here in this OPEX template. That's gonna be my headcount data up top.

You'll notice that this is color coded differently. Right? That's because Qube is pulling this and it recognizes that, hey. This needs to be updated at a different level of detail or in a different screen.

Right? That's because I have a detailed payroll roster, and I don't want somebody just keying in fifty grand here. Right? I want that built up.

So I can come in here to my headcount template, and right now it's empty. But I have all my data stored within queue. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go fetch my roster of employees. And And in this case, it includes some new hires and things like that that I wanna bring on on the team.

And you can see it's got, you know, everything we'd expect from, like, a standard payroll template. This can be built to match yours. Right? Here, I've got the name, the title, their salary, what health care plan they're on, what and are they commission based, whatever it might be.

Right? We can bring that in state, you know, tax rates for specific countries. Doesn't matter. But just for the sake of this example, let's go add a new employee in.

I'll copy this down just for the sake of time. And we're gonna go hire my oldest daughter here, Felicity Bullis.

And she's a second grader, so let's give her a nice salary of six hundred k. Seems fitting. Right? So now I can go publish that data in, and keeps gonna bring into the model, Felicity, and we've hired her on her birthday, August eighth.

So you can see it's kind of a partial month in August, fully ramped up after that. Keeps it also gonna be generating those values from this template for my payroll taxes, my benefits or insurance plans, four zero one k, head comp versus FTE calcs, whatever is relevant at your level of detail from a payroll plan perspective, we'll bring that in. Also can manage hourly employees. If it's, like, named hourly employees, great, where you can do overtime assumptions.

If it's, hey. We just have ten laborers in this position and their average pay is twenty dollars an hour. You can do it that way as well. Totally flexible in terms of how you want to approach your headcount planning.

The key here is I published that in. Now I can refresh this. Again, there's no formulas linking tabs or workbooks anymore.

Cube is just gonna update this, so I should see Felicity joining the team here. And I can see her starting in August. You see five to six, that jump. But this is like a massive jump. Forty five k to ninety eight k in terms of my salary and wages.

We have security in queue. Right? So people should only be able to see the data there is specific for them. Right?

So if I try to drill down on this and I don't have the right access, it's not gonna give me any details. But if I do have the right level of access, I can go ahead and drill into that, and Qube will pull back the detail, like, people who make up that number. Right? So here I can see I've got Felicity Bullis.

She's gonna start, I think, off to the right here on her birthday, August eighth, and then her annual salary is gonna be six hundred k. Boom. Right there. That's a indicator that a, you know, senior market analyst, maybe that should be sixty k or whatever it is. Right? I can adjust that to be what it needs to be.

Awesome. So planning, tons of capabilities, different levels of detail you can operate at. Again, the big key to remember here is we're gonna be a ultimate flexibility. You can lay out your templates however you want.

Cube's saving you all the time. We're dropping the numbers in there to get started. We're pulling them out and aggregating them for you and storing them in different scenarios. You don't have to do that manually.

And it's a friendly environment for your team. They're probably already working in spreadsheets.

It's not some new interface that you're gonna have to build a whole training regimen around so they know what screens to go click on. So really powerful there in terms of getting their collaboration and their input.

Awesome. So we're we're no longer lost in our plans. We can move to spending all that time. We used to, you know, manually be putting together templates and consolidating data to actually collaborating with folks and talking about their budgets and their forecast and their inputs and making more strategic decisions.

That's kind of the top of the pyramid here. Right? Strategy, unleashing all that time is gonna allow you to be freed up to be more strategic. And a couple examples we have to show that are things like dashboards. Right?

No longer am I, you know, having to produce these, like, manually via, you know, Excel sheets and things like that. We can do that. I'll show you next. But, ultimately, I want to give my stakeholders access to their data so they can go interact with it and have different charts and filter and dive in.

Right? So you can see I can hover over these visuals, get more detail. I can click on a component. I can break it out by one of the other dimensions.

I can have it produce, like, mini charts based off of that slice of, in this case, the pie chart.

Also can have different dashboards. Like, this is based on sales rep and performance. Right? Or maybe I wanna go see, you know, how Clark Griswold is performing.

Right? Any of the, you know, widgets or charts that are hooked up to that will sync and update based on my selections. So maybe I wanna go see, you know, specifically a a given product. But really cool here because we're gonna allow you to access and interact with that data as any level of team member, department head, finance team member, sales, you know, leader, whatever it might be.

So from a visualization standpoint, that's option one ultimately to give them the ability to interact.

A lot of our customers just need to put up board decks. Right? So what we'll see them do is either an Excel or GSheets.

Right? They've got, you know, a table in here that's generated a bunch of numbers for them. You know, I can go up to that wipes it. I'll let Qube refresh these values into my table, then those are essentially synced into my board decks.

So here I can come, hey. I've updated my data from Qube. Now either in Excel or PowerPoint, I have those visuals linked in, and now I can just hit update. So I was talking to one customer who used to spend nine, ten hours a month putting their board deck together.

Now it takes them twenty, thirty minutes. Right? They still double check the numbers, update the narrative in the slides, whatever it might be. That's a whole day of time.

That's twelve days a year. That's two and a half weeks of time that was just freed up because Qube's hanging out with them and helping them facilitate those board decks. So a lot more capabilities than what I can just cover in this short time we have here together today. We can do detailed, like, revenue plans with drivers and, you know, inputs and assumptions.

We can do cash forecasts, tons of different reporting off of operational metrics. We have customers bringing in inventory data, whatever it might be that's relevant for you.

But I'll just flip back here real quick to my slides.

And, you know, we've we've become strategic. Q was helping us kinda unlock the different levels of this hierarchy of needs, this pyramid here, and allowing us to be more collaborative with our team, drive more of the narrative. So from our customers who are using this, tons of quotes. I mentioned a couple time savings. Right? One of our customers saving three days a month alone on their p and l reports.

Our customer who's saving a day a month on board decks. Right? We see that time savings across the board. What we see our customers moving from doing annual budgets only to doing monthly reforecasts, even rolling forecast, twelve, eighteen, twenty four months out. Right? So you can see some of the, you know, customers we have listed here in terms of, like, spending less time on data manipulation, more time on analysis, reducing the amount of time it takes to produce the financials, allowing for new reports that maybe we couldn't do before.

Right? It's a real step up for our our financial work that we're doing. That's edge fitness. So tons of great customer stories.

But, yeah, looking forward to to hearing any questions that might have come up. So I'll I'll pop over to our q and a, and I can stop sharing my screen and see if Alyssa, you, and Taylor have anything that we wanna address from the chat.

Yes. Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been great. We definitely have a few questions lined up.

So first, there's a couple that are kinda similar, so I'm just gonna loop them together.

First is how many users can use Qube at the same time? And from there, if multiple users are using Qube at the same time, does this affect real time data entry?

So great question. What's really cool with cool with Qube is we give you unlimited users. So as many of you only budget type licenses as you want with your package.

As many of those folks who wanna be in planning at the same time can. And I didn't showcase it today. We could follow-up on this with whoever needs to talk about it, but we do have robust security both from, like, a SOC two compliance perspective, but from a permissioning, perspective as well. So if I only have access to the marketing data, when when I log in to Qube, it's only gonna allow me to sleep that cut of the data related to marketing.

So that inherently limits, like, people overstepping each other. But if Taylor and I were happened to be working on the exact same number and exact same cell, whoever hits publish last wins, that's how it works in all the applications out there. But real time data entry, you can have as many people in there going going to town as you need, on a given plan. So you don't have to worry about, like, having people in specific time windows to make up data updates.

Awesome. Next question we got here. Is it the norm to work with a consultant when onboarding Qube?

No. All of Qube's implementations are done in house.

So we have a couple a great process where we'll kinda get you ready, make sure you're getting all your assets together. We'll kick off our implementation, get all the plumbing hooked up. We'll build your hierarchies. We'll load the data.

We'll tie it out before we hand it off to you. And as part of that, we have a really great training regimen to, like, get you up to speed on Qube. And then after that go live, we have what we call a ninety day activation period. Reason we do ninety days is kind of those first three closed cycles.

You got the cube customer success team kinda riding along with you. So as you have questions, have you have new use cases, you wanna build a new report, right, they're gonna help guide you in that experience to make sure you're having, like, a really good, you know you know, taking the training wheels off period after we're officially live. And that's all included in kind of with with your Qube package, and it's all Qube in house resources that you're working with.

Awesome.

Alright.

Another question we have here. What are the main points that set apart your solution from the other players in the space?

Yeah. Absolutely. And, Taylor, feel to feel free to jump in after me if you have anything to add.

I think it calls calls back is we are gonna be the the platform that's gonna allow you to move the fastest. And it's, in my opinion, having used a bunch of these applications, the most flexible and the most scalable solution.

A big reason for that is the no code interface. Right? So you're not having to learn new syntax to get moving. You wanna add something to the report, just add it and hit fetch.

It's there. So we're allowing you to move fast, both in terms of learning it, interacting with the reports and templates. And then the other piece is Qube can latch onto your existing templates. So, again, we're flexible.

We're meeting you where you wanna be. But then inevitably, as your business changes, whether it's from a plan or a model or a report, you saw how easy it was for me to manipulate and make changes. Right? Most applications, like, you have to call a consultant.

You're waiting a couple weeks for them to come on board. They're charging you five, ten grand for those changes. Like, you truly are in the driver's seat as a finance team member using queue. So that's my quick take on it.

But, Taylor, anything I missed?

No. I think you said exactly what I would have said. I think, you know, just in my own words, it's the most user friendly solution that, you know, customers can really own themselves without having to hire product experts, consultants, other team members to manage. So that's part of why, you know, people adopt Q really quickly as well.

Love it. Alright. I think we got time for one more before we share the resources.

So this last one, can the data sources be from Excel sheets, or does it have to come from NetSuite or QuickBooks?

No. So we're source system agnostic. I think we have I don't even know how many systems. It seems like we're connecting to a new one each week.

So whether it's, you know, a niche GL for your industry, whether it's an operational system, a CRM, a data warehouse, a snowflake, something like that, or a lot of our customers just have data, like, metrics they track that only lives in a spreadsheet. So we have, like, that publish button where you can shoot those numbers into cubes. So it's now in a central source of truth. And that way, if somebody deletes that spreadsheet, they just don't disappear.

Right? It's it's stored in our cube database. So wherever the data is, we can usually get it in. It's just what type of data is it, what does that system allow in terms of a connection capability.

But, you know, most customers, pretty much every metric they truly need, we can get into cube.

That's what we like to hear.

Alright. Thank you so much, Jim and Taylor. This has been super helpful. Before we let everyone go today, I just wanna share a couple of resources so that you feel empowered to take next steps once you leave us today.

So let me share my screen here.

Alright.

So first, Jim mentioned earlier in the presentation, but prior to this session, we actually had another webinar where we unpack the strategic, finance hierarchy and needs a little bit more. So if you wanna dive deeper into that and learn more about it, highly recommend checking that session out.

Next is our strategic finance assessment. So if you wanna know where on this pyramid you are, what level you're at, what you need to work on, for yourself and for your finance team, this is a great place to start. You just answer a few questions, and it'll help you assess where you're at so that you can better and more efficiently get where you wanna go. So definitely recommend checking that out as a next step.

Next, booking a custom demo. So Jim took you through a lot of great cute features today, but if you have specific questions that weren't answered or you wanna dive a little bit deeper into certain aspects of the product, we're more than happy to do that for you. You can just click right here, book a custom demo with someone on our team. And last is Christina Ross, our founder and CEO, who is also a former three time CFO. She is constantly posting great stuff on her LinkedIn, talking about the strategic finance hierarchy of needs all the time, and sharing really just great tips and advice for finance professionals, because she's been there, she's done that, and now she's excited to share.

So if you wanna be learning, staying in tune of what's going on in finance, highly recommend following her on LinkedIn.

And that is everything we have for you today. So thank you so much, everyone. Again, Jim, Taylor, everyone who tuned in. Be sure to keep an eye on your inbox for all of these resources and links, including the recording and slides.

And with that, have a great day, everyone.

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