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Webinar
Cube
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Product
Solutions
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Details
In this webinar, you’ll see how Cube helps FP&A teams take the complexity out of vendor planning. We’ll cover:
Why Vendor Planning Matters
Improve visibility, reduce budget surprises, and drive more accurate, strategic financial decisions.
How Cube Centralizes Vendor Data
Cube consolidates all vendor spend, contracts, and assumptions into one source of truth for easier analysis and collaboration.
Using Vendor Expense Models in Cube
Flexible vendor expense models let teams map, update, and roll forward costs seamlessly across budgets and forecasts.
Multi-Scenario Modeling of Vendor Spend Impacts
Cube enables instant scenario comparisons to show how vendor changes affect budgets, forecasts, and financial performance.
How to Tie This Into Your Workflows
Vendor planning integrates directly into annual planning and rolling forecasts for a smoother, more reliable FP&A process.
Speakers
Video Transcription
Hi, and welcome to Cube's webinar, the vendor planning playbook for the modern finance team. We see some familiar names and faces here, which is great, and some new ones. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Really appreciate your time today, especially with this being one of the most hectic periods for FP and A professionals in the holiday season. For that, we aim to give you some ROI by showing how Cube helps FP and A teams take the complexity out of vendor planning.
Slide, Taylor. Some quick clarifications. There's gonna be a live q and a at the end of the presentation. You can drop your questions in the q and a box, which we can point out when we get to that portion. Recording and slides will be sent to you post event, so you'll have all this. You don't need to take furious notes, but we like we're note taking people. We respect that.
We're also gonna have a vendor planning template and video. So let's call that our little holiday gifts to all of you for joining. Thank you.
Taylor, next slide. Main event. Our webinar today will be led by Taylor Josephs, our senior FP and A solutions and success partner. Taylor has years of experience in FP and A consulting and has worn many hats over three plus years here at Cube, including solutions architecture, product marketing, and customer enablement.
I'm gonna get out of her way let her walk you through vendor planning with Cube. Thank you, Taylor.
Thanks so much, Rocky. Thanks everyone for joining today. Again, as Rocky mentioned, I recognize that everybody is likely very busy wrapping up budget season, prepping for year end close. So we really appreciate your time with us today.
The goal of today is to cover how to streamline your vendor planning process or really just how to get that kicked off in the first place using some of Cube's tested best practices.
Today, we're gonna cover kind of four overall plays in terms of how you can best streamline this process.
Play number one in our vendor planning playbook agenda is going to be how to really centralize your vendor level data in one source of truth, which is q. Play number two is how to build scalable vendor planning templates that are distributable and easy to use and repeatable across your organization.
Play three is how to flexibly model different vendor spend scenarios. And finally, play four is how to track the impacts of those different spend decisions across your different financial statements.
So let's get into it a little bit here. We're gonna dig into the product in a moment, but I do wanna kinda set the stage on why we're talking about vendor spend in the first place.
When we look at most companies' p and ls, vendor spend is usually one of the largest and fastest growing spend categories outside of headcount, which we took a look at in our last webinar.
Vendor spend touches nearly every part of the business, whether it's software, agencies, logistics, contractors, professional services.
And unlike revenue, vendor costs are something that we actually can control, especially if we have the right visibility.
The difficulty with getting that visibility is that while vendor spend is usually a massive lever, it's often planned at too high of a level.
A lot of finance teams will be budgeting to just their top level GL accounts and call it a day, which ultimately makes it really difficult to see what's truly driving the numbers behind your expenses.
A small change at the vendor level as well, such as renegotiating contracts or delaying contract start dates, might not look big on its own. But when it's rolled up across departments, time periods, entities, other dimensionality, that impact on your financial statements can be really significant.
This is why a lot of modern finance teams are shifting away from just that top level account based planning and starting to plan at a more granular vendor level directly.
And the challenge with vendor planning today outside of systems like Cube is that data is often scattered across a lot of different platforms. There's GL data coming from your ERP, spend data coming from AP systems, inputs from spreadsheets, various contract information as well. And wrangling that data together for reporting and planning purposes takes an inordinate amount of time and often prevents people from even getting started on the vendor spend planning process in the first place.
Additionally, that top level GL planning is often hiding key drivers to spend, as I mentioned. And, ultimately, all of that complexity and that hidden information makes it nearly impossible to answer questions like which vendors are driving cost increases or what happens if we delay, renegotiate, or cancel a contract or even where do vendor spend decisions impact our broader forecast.
So this is why we want to cover the vendor planning playbook today to equip all of you on this session with the best practices and tools to put a really streamlined vendor planning process in place.
We're going to cover how to centralize vendor data in Cube, how to standardize how vendors are being planned across teams, how to model multiple vendor spend scenarios, and finally, measuring that impact across your different reports.
So with that being said, let's see this in action right in the Cube platform.
So I'm gonna flip over to the Cube platform here today. This is our Cube workspace. And for those of you who are new to Cube on the call today, this is really kinda where the magic happens in terms of getting your data systematized in one source of truth and architecting that data in the ways that make sense for your organization's reporting and planning needs.
Cube is going to organize all of your data around your key dimensionality. So as mentioned, every organization, of course, is going to build out their GL accounts, their full financial statements, like their income statements. You know, we've got some vendor related expenses here, like software, shipping and postage, for example. If we keep scrolling, we've got our balance sheet, our cash flow statement, as well as other operational data like KPIs and HR metrics.
But, of course, every organization needs a bit further visibility and granularity to their numbers. Instead of just looking at everything at the GL account level, we also likely want to slice and dice that data by things like our departments, sales, marketing. We wanna analyze expenses across those different teams.
Scenarios here are going to be utilized to capture all those different versions of your data, including historical actuals, but also your various budget versions that you might be establishing, forecasts, vendor level forecasts, and other would have scenarios.
We'll dig into scenarios a bit further here in a moment. But just to give you the full picture, other slices of data that I have in this model include my time dimension so that I can report and plan at the monthly, quarterly, and yearly level roll ups.
Entities here are important in my company, products, markets.
And finally, the most important dimension for today's purposes is vendor.
Now if you want to perform vendor level planning, you don't necessarily have to have a vendor dimension in your cube, but establishing this dimension makes it so much easier down the line to build reports that are maybe analyzing the impacts of vendor spend decisions across your financial statements.
If I ever want to run a BVA on what my vendor spend on Salesforce looked like last year compared to this year, I can always perform that because I now have these slices of data available for me within Q.
Now you're probably wondering, where does the data actually come from? How am I populating the data across these vendors? I'll show you the mapping process here in a moment. But the really neat thing about Qube is that you don't necessarily have to build out your vendor dimension the same way that it looks in your ERP or your other accounting systems.
In your accounting systems, you might have thousands of different vendors that are maybe spelled slightly differently, but they're ultimately reporting on the same exact thing.
And Qube gives you the flexibility to make mapping rules and mapping changes as you're importing that data to our system so that you're essentially organizing and compiling your data in the best way suited for your reporting and planning needs.
To highlight that, we're gonna navigate over to this integrations tab, and this is where you're going to establish your connections to your data sources that you want to feed into Q.
In my case here, I have multiple different connections to various GL systems because I'm a multi entity company and need to consolidate data from multiple different ERPs. But we're just gonna take a peek at one of these ERPs today, which is gonna be Sage Intact. You'll see here that Sage is asking me to update my mapping before I load in that data from that system to queue. So we're gonna go ahead and click on that button, and we're gonna see that there are several dimension members that need to be mapped before we run an import from that ERP.
What I can do here is click edit mapping, and this is going to take me to a mapping screen where I can decide how the data coming from Sage is going to appear and roll up in queue.
Now this is hypercritical from an account standpoint because we may want to rename certain accounts here as they're getting ingested to Qube, but it's also, of course, really critical from a vendor spend standpoint.
You'll see here that on the left hand side on this vendor tab, I have all of my Sage Intact vendors here that are tagged with a vendor number dash vendor name. We might have a handful of redundant vendor names here coming from our ERP.
And on the Cube side, we don't necessarily have to display everything in the same way.
If these are all vendors that I do care about reporting on, I could go ahead and create new dimensions on the Cube side for every one of these.
On the Qube side, I can click add dimension. We can call this ADP, and this will now create a new ADP vendor in Qube that I can start reporting on.
However, if these are all vendors that I'd prefer to just group together at an aggregate level, I have a couple of options.
I could pick and choose individual vendors that I want to roll into maybe a top level vendor other category. And that vendor other category is essentially going to be a lump sum of any vendor that I just don't need to report on individually.
So that's effectively streamlining the whole process of reporting on vendors at the detailed level in Cube. Anything that isn't relevant to look at individually, I can map in this way.
But Cube also allows you to set up mapping rules to streamline that process even further. We can click into this mapping rules section here, and you'll see that I can establish mapping rules on any of my dimensions that are coming in from Intact.
On the vendor side, I could pick a rule like map to existing. If I want every new vendor coming in from Sage to be mapped to that vendor other, I could set up that rule at a holistic level.
Or if I want every new vendor coming from Sage to establish a new vendor on the Qube side, I could also pick create new, and this will ultimately send all of those new vendors to this all vendors roll up, and we're gonna get individual new dimensions on the Qube side.
So I wanted to highlight that concept first because this ties back to that play number one, which is all about centralizing your vendor level data from your ERP, your AP systems, and any other data source that you have in one source of truth.
Cube is serving as that data model and that repository for all of that disparate information.
And now what you'll see in a moment here is that we can start playing around with that data in different ways for planning purposes.
Before I start diving into my planning model, though, I wanna just showcase how I've established my planning scenarios in queue.
Right now, at the end of the year, I've already established my twenty twenty six budget, and this has been locked down. It's been approved by all of the c suite. We're ready to go with that budget. So what I've done on the Cube side is I've loaded that budget to a specific scenario.
If we scroll down in these budget scenarios here, you're gonna see my vendor level planning scenarios, and you're gonna see here my vendor budget f y twenty six listed here. You'll notice that there's a block on that budget here, which effectively means this is a lockdown scenario that nobody is going to be able to make changes to anymore.
However, there were a few updates to some spend categories that just hit my desk, and I need to start encountering those into one of my forecasts. I wanna start baking in those changes to a more dynamic plan. And rather than having to write those over my budget, what I can do in Qube is I can make a duplicate copy of that locked budget and call it a forecast or whatever I want to name it. In my case, I clicked copy, and I called this vendor forecast base case.
And this is ultimately going to be where I'm writing all of those updates back to. And now we'll be able to start comparing and contrasting the two scenarios side by side.
So with all of that background context here, let's dive into what an actual kind of systematized template might look like from a vendor spend perspective.
I'm gonna go ahead and open up this template here, and I'll close out of the sidebar for right now just so you get the full view.
And anytime you're planning for vendor expenses or any other type of budgeting or forecasting, you have tons of options for how to do that in Q. You can perform all of that planning work right in a spreadsheet, whether it's Excel, g Sheets, on a Mac, or on a PC, and you can also perform all of that planning work right in the Qube platform itself.
We're gonna be spending most of our time planning today in Excel, but I will showcase a couple of examples of how we can report back in the Qube workspace to sort of review all of our impacts to our financial models.
But, again, Cube gives you that flexibility to work where you're most comfortable. So, typically, a finance professional is going to be most comfortable working in spreadsheets, so that's where I'm working today.
And in my case, I'm maybe the head of FP and A for this organization, and I've established this template here.
Now what you'll see in this template is that we have our accounts that we want to plan for, and these are all OpEx accounts like paid ads, promotional items. We also have things like software, office supplies. We can expand some of these other ones here and see more generic things like facilities and rent and whatnot.
But nested alongside all of those accounts is our vendor dimension. So we can see here that we've got our list of vendors that are relevant for each of these expense categories, and Qube gives us that flexibility to plan not just at that GL level, but also at that more granular vendor level when we have that set up as one of our dimensions.
Now a few other best practices that I've set up here in this template that make it more dynamic and easy to use across the organization is I have established this vendor column here as a pick list.
The reason why I did that is because anytime other department heads might be collaborating in this template, I don't want them to be able to just write whatever they want in that vendor column because that text that they're inputting might not match a dimension that I actually have established and loaded data to in queue.
So I want to keep this as kind of a structured list of the key vendors that we're allowed to plan for. And anytime one of my budget owners wants to plan for a new vendor, they can come to me first, and we can add that into the queue and get the template updated accordingly.
Additionally, there's other drop downs here that allow us to select which scenario we want to be planning within. Today, I've selected my vendor budget, f y twenty six, which, as mentioned before, is my lockdown final budget.
But, again, today, I need to start making some adjustments to my forecast after we have some updated spend decisions.
So what I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna open up my Qube sidebar, and you'll see here once this sidebar loads that this template has already been connected to my Qube where all of my data resides.
Qube is picking up which scenarios and time periods I have in the column headers, my vendors, accounts, and other dimensions down the rows.
And now if I wanna start planning in that forecast scenario, all I have to do here is select it from this list. I'll type vendor forecast, base case, and we're first going to collect our data that is already living in that scenario.
When I click fetch here, you're going to see a big change take place in this template. All of this text here that is currently black was the data that was assigned to that vendor budget that was finalized.
But now all of that cell text just turned blue. And what that means for me is I'm able to actually modify this information and make changes to the data in myCUBE for this specific scenario because it hasn't yet been locked down in the system.
So what I'm gonna change today is going to be a very basic example.
Maybe we're having a board meeting in January of twenty twenty six, and we wanna order a few custom Stanley mugs from Staples that have our nice cube logo on them for all of our board members.
So in my promotional items here, what I'm gonna do is select that Staples vendor. So I can either scroll through this list. I can type in Staples and pick it.
I'll say Stanley Muggs for board of directors, and we're gonna go ahead and throw in our expense here in January. Maybe it's one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars.
When I make that edit here, all I have to do to sync this back to my vendor forecast is use this publish data button in the right hand sidebar. When I click publish data, Qube is going to sync with the change that I just made, and it's going to load that twelve fifty back to my promotional items account, the Staples vendor, and to that vendor level forecast.
Now to actually review the impact of that spend change across other reports, I can navigate over to a multitude of different ways of analyzing this.
This first report here that I'm gonna showcase is my vendor spend report, and we're comparing our base forecast against that finalized budget that we preceded and that we set behind the scenes.
You can see this full list of all of our vendors here. We're performing a variance analysis at the monthly and the year to date level and even tracking what our remaining budget is across those vendors at the year to date perspective.
So now that I just made that change to the Staples vendor, which is here on row thirty four, I'll be able to fetch out this data, and you should see a variance of twelve fifty populate at that monthly and that year to date level, and we can now see that we're a bit over budget here on that vendor.
So very simple example, but I wanted to highlight this first just to show how simple it is to start syncing those changes back to Qube. But I also just wanted to highlight really some of those key ways of streamlining your templates and making them as dynamic and driver based as possible.
But we're gonna take this a step further here and check this out at the kind of financial level. We have another report here set up that is looking at our operating expense accounts at the total vendor level. And, again, we pushed in data to our promotional items account. So if we see that on our report, we should be able to fetch this back and view that same twelve fifty variance taking place on row twenty eight.
And, again, this is just a small slice of my p and l, but this would also be reflected on my full income statement. This would show any other impacts across our other financial statements like our cash flow, balance sheet, what have you.
But let's take this into a little bit more of a complex example. Going back to my OpEx by vendor template here, I have another use case where I want to start planning for some increased expenses for a vendor that I already was foreseeing expenses for this year.
Our Salesforce vendor here just came back to us and told us that we're gonna see a ten percent price hike in twenty twenty six, unfortunately, and we need to start factoring that into our forecast.
We weren't informed of this in time to incorporate it into our budget, but what we can do now is we can reference last year's actual data and perform any calculations and logic on top of that to impact our forecast.
So as you just saw me expand these columns here, you'll notice that I'm also pulling in my historical actuals at the vendor level. We can see that we were charged a thousand dollars per month for Salesforce last year.
But in twenty twenty six, we're gonna see that ten percent price hike.
So to increase that price here for this forecast season, we're just gonna create a simple Excel formula. We're gonna say equals last year in January times one point one, and we should get that eleven hundred dollars. And we can now drag out that formula for the remainder of the year.
And, again, once we make that change, all we have to do to sync that back to Cube is use that publish data button, and Cube is going to adjust that Salesforce software expense for us in the system. It's gonna tie that into that vendor forecast. And now if we go back to our vendor BVA, you should see on this Salesforce line that increase in our expenses hitting that forecast. So you'll see a hundred dollars in January, hundred dollars Jan year to date. But if we roll this forward to December, you'll see that increase to twelve thousand dollars in those year to date columns.
So, again, you can really perform any type of dynamic logic that you want to across your templates, and it doesn't necessarily have to be done in the spreadsheet. There's a ton of different ways that we don't really have time to show off today that you can establish drivers in the back end of Qube. You can set up formulas and calculations on your Qube accounts as well to perform adjustments just like this.
We'll send you a short video that highlights some of those key concepts after today's session, but we do see a lot of our customers tending to lean towards the spreadsheet approach because it grants them the flexibility to really design things however they want to.
With that being said, I'm gonna show off one other kind of dynamic driver based calculation for calculating our vendor spend on this vendor allocations tab.
Now I received a question from one of our customers prior to this call about how do we start allocating our vendor spend across something like departments.
So I built up this example here to show that off. And to explain this a little bit, what I want to do is I want to push a vendor expense, in this case, it's going to be Slack, across all of my different departments based upon those departments' percentage of headcount. So if sales makes up twenty five percent of our headcount, we want twenty five percent of that Slack expense to be allocated to that department.
So what I'm gonna do here first is I'm gonna fetch my department level headcount in this first section by using Qube. All I have to do here is click fetch data, and Cube is going to populate these cells here pertaining to my department level headcount. We're gonna see that month over month, we've got a pretty steep increase in our headcount in the sales department. Other departments tend to taper off a bit further here, and we're getting that total row here so that we can perform our headcount percentage calculation.
Beneath that, I've driven that percentage headcount calculation here by simply taking our headcount. So we're taking that ten FTEs in the sales department for January and dividing it by that total of fifty seven, and we're running that same calculation month over month, department by department.
Now to actually drive that vendor spend into all of these departments, we have to first input our assumption around the total annual expense for Slack.
Maybe Slack is a hundred and twenty thousand dollars for the total year, so we're gonna go ahead and make that entry here. And you can design your templates in ways that make it even clearer where people are supposed to make inputs and where people are supposed to be fetching. But in my case, I'm inserting that hundred and twenty k in this total annual expense.
And now if we start to scroll down, you're going to see my cube published section is now filled out with values.
Now the way I've calculated these values is I'm simply taking that cell c seven, so that hundred and twenty thousand dollars, dividing it by twelve, so month over month, and then I'm multiplying it by that allocation percentage that we're getting from the headcount by department.
So we're multiplying that hundred and twenty thousand dollars, dividing it by twelve times that seventeen point five percent to get about seventeen hundred dollars for the sales department, and this is going all the way throughout the year department by department.
And, ultimately, I want this to impact my software account here in that Slack vendor. And so now that I've made that change, all I have to do is publish that change to Qube. We're gonna go ahead and flip to our allocation publish range. Neat thing about Qube is you can have multiple different ranges on the same spreadsheet. We're gonna click apply, and we're gonna go ahead and click publish data.
Qube is now going to sync with all of this information. It's going to store it in our scenario. And in this case, this scenario is a copy of my original vendor budget. And now if we wanna take a look at a p and l variance report, we can do just that. This is my entire p and l here down the rows comparing our original vendor budget against that v two. If we scroll down to that software account here, you're gonna see that once I fetch out my data, we will have a variance at the software level of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
And now if we wanna slice this by a specific department, Qube gives us the ability to slice and dice however we want to. If I wanna take a peek at just the sales department, I can refetch, and we should see that perfectly allocated amount of twenty thousand dollars hitting the sales department, and all of our other accounts have refreshed accordingly.
So that's kind of the allocation methodology that we see a lot of our customers setting up and having tons of success with because the key value of Cube is that we're not limiting you to a rigid structure or format for building this. You have the same flexibility that spreadsheets will offer you, but the power of a consolidated data model behind the scenes, summing up your data, tallying everything across your dimensions, and giving you instant access to report after the fact.
Last couple of quick things that I'll highlight here before we start, covering some questions is a lot of times we get asked about how do I start incorporating net new vendors into my reports when they've been added to queue. For example, this report here looks at a list of all of my vendors that actually have expense data in my forecast and in my budget.
We've got this total vendors line here beneath it, which is a parent dimension in cube that's automatically summing everything up. But we also have this check beneath it that's looking at whether the total of these vendors here actually matches that all vendors row.
We can see here that it doesn't match. This is two point three million, but the all vendors is two point eight million. So, clearly, we're missing a few vendors in this report.
Now a recent feature that Qube has just launched is dynamic ranges, which gives Qube the ability to automatically insert any net new child dimensions to your existing reports.
This report has dynamic ranges turned on. So if I go ahead and click fetch data, you're gonna see a prompt here that's going to ask me, your range includes parent dimensions with newly added children in Cube. These child rows will be inserted on fetch. Do you want to proceed?
I'll click proceed. Cube is going to insert any additional rows. It's also gonna auto collapse any rows that don't have data. And we're now going to see this foots message here at the bottom that's telling us all of these vendor level rows actually match that total vendor line.
And final piece I'll highlight here is that once your report looks good to go, you've made sure that all of your vendors are incorporated, you can now distribute this either from a spreadsheet directly or right back in the Qube workspace.
In my case today, I set this up as a queue web report by simply highlighting my entire formatted report, including the borders and all of the headers.
Down in the spreadsheet sidebar, I created a web report already by simply saving this as a new report.
And now when I click view report, this is going to take me right back to the Qube workspace where we're gonna see this report manifest. We'll see the report fetch. We're going to get access to all those same variance outputs, and we're even getting that calculated check that we set up in the spreadsheet.
If I delete a cell, you'll see that error message again, but I can easily refetch, get that data back. We'll see that it fits. And if I wanna slice and dice by different departments, like maybe just looking at marketing today, I can easily do that just like I can within the spreadsheet environment.
So we covered a lot of ground here today, but the four kind of key plays, again, are centralizing that data in Cube, ensuring that everything is mapped to one source of truth in the system. We've highlighted how to plan at the vendor level and how to build your templates in a really streamlined way to make sure people aren't, pushing data to erroneous, misnamed vendors.
And finally, we also discussed how to make vendor decisions with full financial visibility. Once you have the full picture into how your spend is broken down by vendor or by department, you're able to really perform your FP and A your way with the clearest picture possible.
So I hope this was super helpful, but I will pass it back to Rocky to start reading off some questions that came up.
Dynamic ranges. You I feel like you just dropped a bombshell in the middle. That launched to yesterday?
Yesterday. Yes. Yes. We had a newsletter out to our customers yesterday, so brand new feature here. Get to see it in action today.
Lovely. I'll start off with Edgar. Is there a separate vendor scenario?
And by scenario, it means company forecast. And does it tie back to the overarching company scenario slash forecast? Yeah.
That's a really great question. You can set it up in a lot of different ways.
In my case, just for my demo purposes, I have my vendor planning all performed in a separate vendor forecast. So if you take a peek at my cube again, you'll be able to see that my scenario dimension has a breakdown of just high level budgets that are mainly at the GL level, but we also have some of our vendor scenarios here that are at that vendor perspective.
You could also plan at the vendor level at your total kind of GL level budget, and those specific accounts that are impacted by vendors would just have further visibility than your other GL accounts.
Or what we also see our customers do sometimes is they'll maintain a separate vendor scenario and a separate top level budget, and then they'll create a parent on top of those two scenarios to essentially sum them up in the system.
So there's a multitude of ways to do it. It really kinda depends on what's gonna feel easiest for your team and how much you want to kind of compartmentalize those two scenarios.
Thank you. Is there a limit to the amount of vendors you can add?
There's no limitation. However, in any system, it's always best to be cognizant of overloading the system with too much information.
For example, you know, I might have fifty vendors that are Amazon, Amazon dot com, Amazon Inc, Amazon Global. And on the Cube side, it doesn't make sense to overwhelm the system with those added fifty vendors.
So that's where mapping is really key. When we're pulling in our data from our ERP, we could take those fifty vendors and just push them into one Amazon vendor on the Cube side.
But, no, you can have hundreds, thousands of vendors if you want to, but, you know, it's always easier to work with a system that has a more streamlined set of dimensionality.
Congratulations if you have thousands of vendors, and also sorry. Yes. That's why we're here. That's why we're here.
You got any questions, pop them in the q and a. Taylor, with the Slack integration, the AI questioning, is it simple for I'm not a I'm not an FP and A person. I'm a marketing person. For me to ask questions about vendors via Slack?
Totally. Yes. So whether you're in Slack, whether you're in Microsoft Teams, or whether you wanna access our AI analyst right in the cube work space, you can ask questions about any slice of your data, and that includes vendors. As long as you have vendors set up as one of your key slices of data in your Cube, you can say, how did my vendors spend from last quarter compared to this quarter?
And Cube will think about that for a minute. It's going to compile that data according to which accounts were impacted by vendor spend, and it will ultimately pull a time based analysis comparing last quarter to this quarter. And you can do that in Slack as well. I don't have my Slack, chatbot open right now, so I'm showing it in the cube workspace.
Yeah. We, quintillion. There's a quintillion number of data cells that our AI searches. And as you say, as you can see, everybody, it takes about twenty to forty seconds.
But The accuracy is is a hundred percent, which is good.
Yep. Hunter Hall's got a question. Is it difficult to set up this template slash, are there any prebuilt templates? Really nice leading question.
Yes. Excellent question. So first off, no. It's not difficult at all to set up one of these templates. In fact, we could build it from scratch right now in about two minutes. I won't bore you all with that process. But to show you kind of the nitty gritty behind the scenes, all I had to do to build up this template was just make sure that I'm incorporating all of the dimensional intersections that Qube is gonna store data in.
Qube, like any FP and A system that's designed in this multidimensional model, needs to store data across all of your dimensions. So in my case, I simply inserted columns here targeting my account dimension, the department that I wanna push into, my entity dimension.
For dimensions that maybe aren't pertinent to OpEx level vendor planning, we can always just push in data to a product other or market other dimension. But as long as all of those dimensions are targeted in your spreadsheet, all you have to do to get this template connected to your Qube is highlight it. Once we highlight our template, we select our range, and Qube starts picking up those dimensions and allowing you to push and pull your data.
But for that segue portion too, I will be sending this template after today's webinar for anybody to utilize to poke around in and explore. And, of course, you know, if you wanna get this up and running for your own cube model, you'll have to map in your dimensions to these rows, but we are also always available from a customer success perspective to assist you with that process too.
Love that.
I'm gonna leave the leave the room open for a few more moments. If there's any other questions, pop them in the q and a.
We have an anonymous attendee asking, will dynamic ranges also work in Cube online reports?
Great question. So, yes, the answer is yes. They will eventually. Currently, they are not integrated with the online web reports because we wanted to establish those web reports as kind of the the basics first to get them up and running and ready for people to use as quickly as possible. But, eventually, yes, dynamic ranges will work right within those web reports, and anything that you're used to doing within spreadsheet driven cube reports will also be reflected in those web reports.
Thank you. And at least one more from Andrea. Do you think there's a way to set up a template where I can validate that the vendors were booked under the correct budgeted department?
Oh, yeah. That's a great question. We would probably wanna take a peek further at what your kinda current process is for validating whether they're budgeted correctly. But, you know, that's absolutely possible. I think a really good way of, you know, performing that would be running vendor budget versus actuals comparisons to see sort of, you know, where vendors were hitting in your GL from your ERP, comparing that against the spend that you were projecting for the budget season, and seeing where any mismatches might happen. But we would be happy to chat with you further about that to kinda see what your current setup looks like.
Thousand percent. Gonna read this one live from Summer. We will pull the vendor from the accounting system then to a mapping sheet then to a vendor level report, question mark, trying to understand the setup process.
Yeah. Yeah. So that's basically the concept of it. The the mapping sheet, though, is completely automated behind the scenes. So, basically, what's gonna happen on the Cube side you know, I was doing this in a fairly manual way to show you sort of the the back end setup.
But on the Qube side, you'll be able to set up scheduled imports from your source systems, and those imports will target your data into Qube on a nightly or weekly cadence. And if you've set up mapping rules too, Cube is gonna automatically understand how to feed in any net new vendors that came from your ERP. If you want more control over that process, though, you can always individually edit your mapping here and pick vendor by vendor how you want things to flow in.
But, again, as soon as that data is loaded into your cube dimensionality, you now can fetch and publish as you please in the spreadsheets or in the cube workspace.
Thank you. I'm gonna ask you one more one more Yeah. Fun one to see if we have any more questions.
What's your favorite Excel shortcut, Taylor?
Oh, I really love control shift plus to add new rows or to add new columns. It just helps you fly through template updates so much quicker.
And control z, of course. Everyone loves control z. Being able to undo your mistakes is is key.
And that's that's my safety net. Yes.
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for the time and information that that you've bespoke and and certainly answering these questions live. Again, everyone will follow-up with the recording, this recording that you're hearing now, the slides, as well as resources such as the template that Taylor app Taylor told you about and the vendor planning video, for more different ways to to slice this whole thing.
As always, please subscribe to our FinanceFix newsletter. It's a really good editorial. It's not even marketing. We're not even trying to sell ourselves. They're just trying to to uplevel everyone's FP and A whether you work with us or not.
And for all our customers, if you need help troubleshooting, obviously, contact support, but also visitor help center might might solve the the question in two clicks rather than three.
We greatly appreciate you your time. We hope you have a happy holidays and a great vendor planning season. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.
Slide, Taylor. Some quick clarifications. There's gonna be a live q and a at the end of the presentation. You can drop your questions in the q and a box, which we can point out when we get to that portion. Recording and slides will be sent to you post event, so you'll have all this. You don't need to take furious notes, but we like we're note taking people. We respect that.
We're also gonna have a vendor planning template and video. So let's call that our little holiday gifts to all of you for joining. Thank you.
Taylor, next slide. Main event. Our webinar today will be led by Taylor Josephs, our senior FP and A solutions and success partner. Taylor has years of experience in FP and A consulting and has worn many hats over three plus years here at Cube, including solutions architecture, product marketing, and customer enablement.
I'm gonna get out of her way let her walk you through vendor planning with Cube. Thank you, Taylor.
Thanks so much, Rocky. Thanks everyone for joining today. Again, as Rocky mentioned, I recognize that everybody is likely very busy wrapping up budget season, prepping for year end close. So we really appreciate your time with us today.
The goal of today is to cover how to streamline your vendor planning process or really just how to get that kicked off in the first place using some of Cube's tested best practices.
Today, we're gonna cover kind of four overall plays in terms of how you can best streamline this process.
Play number one in our vendor planning playbook agenda is going to be how to really centralize your vendor level data in one source of truth, which is q. Play number two is how to build scalable vendor planning templates that are distributable and easy to use and repeatable across your organization.
Play three is how to flexibly model different vendor spend scenarios. And finally, play four is how to track the impacts of those different spend decisions across your different financial statements.
So let's get into it a little bit here. We're gonna dig into the product in a moment, but I do wanna kinda set the stage on why we're talking about vendor spend in the first place.
When we look at most companies' p and ls, vendor spend is usually one of the largest and fastest growing spend categories outside of headcount, which we took a look at in our last webinar.
Vendor spend touches nearly every part of the business, whether it's software, agencies, logistics, contractors, professional services.
And unlike revenue, vendor costs are something that we actually can control, especially if we have the right visibility.
The difficulty with getting that visibility is that while vendor spend is usually a massive lever, it's often planned at too high of a level.
A lot of finance teams will be budgeting to just their top level GL accounts and call it a day, which ultimately makes it really difficult to see what's truly driving the numbers behind your expenses.
A small change at the vendor level as well, such as renegotiating contracts or delaying contract start dates, might not look big on its own. But when it's rolled up across departments, time periods, entities, other dimensionality, that impact on your financial statements can be really significant.
This is why a lot of modern finance teams are shifting away from just that top level account based planning and starting to plan at a more granular vendor level directly.
And the challenge with vendor planning today outside of systems like Cube is that data is often scattered across a lot of different platforms. There's GL data coming from your ERP, spend data coming from AP systems, inputs from spreadsheets, various contract information as well. And wrangling that data together for reporting and planning purposes takes an inordinate amount of time and often prevents people from even getting started on the vendor spend planning process in the first place.
Additionally, that top level GL planning is often hiding key drivers to spend, as I mentioned. And, ultimately, all of that complexity and that hidden information makes it nearly impossible to answer questions like which vendors are driving cost increases or what happens if we delay, renegotiate, or cancel a contract or even where do vendor spend decisions impact our broader forecast.
So this is why we want to cover the vendor planning playbook today to equip all of you on this session with the best practices and tools to put a really streamlined vendor planning process in place.
We're going to cover how to centralize vendor data in Cube, how to standardize how vendors are being planned across teams, how to model multiple vendor spend scenarios, and finally, measuring that impact across your different reports.
So with that being said, let's see this in action right in the Cube platform.
So I'm gonna flip over to the Cube platform here today. This is our Cube workspace. And for those of you who are new to Cube on the call today, this is really kinda where the magic happens in terms of getting your data systematized in one source of truth and architecting that data in the ways that make sense for your organization's reporting and planning needs.
Cube is going to organize all of your data around your key dimensionality. So as mentioned, every organization, of course, is going to build out their GL accounts, their full financial statements, like their income statements. You know, we've got some vendor related expenses here, like software, shipping and postage, for example. If we keep scrolling, we've got our balance sheet, our cash flow statement, as well as other operational data like KPIs and HR metrics.
But, of course, every organization needs a bit further visibility and granularity to their numbers. Instead of just looking at everything at the GL account level, we also likely want to slice and dice that data by things like our departments, sales, marketing. We wanna analyze expenses across those different teams.
Scenarios here are going to be utilized to capture all those different versions of your data, including historical actuals, but also your various budget versions that you might be establishing, forecasts, vendor level forecasts, and other would have scenarios.
We'll dig into scenarios a bit further here in a moment. But just to give you the full picture, other slices of data that I have in this model include my time dimension so that I can report and plan at the monthly, quarterly, and yearly level roll ups.
Entities here are important in my company, products, markets.
And finally, the most important dimension for today's purposes is vendor.
Now if you want to perform vendor level planning, you don't necessarily have to have a vendor dimension in your cube, but establishing this dimension makes it so much easier down the line to build reports that are maybe analyzing the impacts of vendor spend decisions across your financial statements.
If I ever want to run a BVA on what my vendor spend on Salesforce looked like last year compared to this year, I can always perform that because I now have these slices of data available for me within Q.
Now you're probably wondering, where does the data actually come from? How am I populating the data across these vendors? I'll show you the mapping process here in a moment. But the really neat thing about Qube is that you don't necessarily have to build out your vendor dimension the same way that it looks in your ERP or your other accounting systems.
In your accounting systems, you might have thousands of different vendors that are maybe spelled slightly differently, but they're ultimately reporting on the same exact thing.
And Qube gives you the flexibility to make mapping rules and mapping changes as you're importing that data to our system so that you're essentially organizing and compiling your data in the best way suited for your reporting and planning needs.
To highlight that, we're gonna navigate over to this integrations tab, and this is where you're going to establish your connections to your data sources that you want to feed into Q.
In my case here, I have multiple different connections to various GL systems because I'm a multi entity company and need to consolidate data from multiple different ERPs. But we're just gonna take a peek at one of these ERPs today, which is gonna be Sage Intact. You'll see here that Sage is asking me to update my mapping before I load in that data from that system to queue. So we're gonna go ahead and click on that button, and we're gonna see that there are several dimension members that need to be mapped before we run an import from that ERP.
What I can do here is click edit mapping, and this is going to take me to a mapping screen where I can decide how the data coming from Sage is going to appear and roll up in queue.
Now this is hypercritical from an account standpoint because we may want to rename certain accounts here as they're getting ingested to Qube, but it's also, of course, really critical from a vendor spend standpoint.
You'll see here that on the left hand side on this vendor tab, I have all of my Sage Intact vendors here that are tagged with a vendor number dash vendor name. We might have a handful of redundant vendor names here coming from our ERP.
And on the Cube side, we don't necessarily have to display everything in the same way.
If these are all vendors that I do care about reporting on, I could go ahead and create new dimensions on the Cube side for every one of these.
On the Qube side, I can click add dimension. We can call this ADP, and this will now create a new ADP vendor in Qube that I can start reporting on.
However, if these are all vendors that I'd prefer to just group together at an aggregate level, I have a couple of options.
I could pick and choose individual vendors that I want to roll into maybe a top level vendor other category. And that vendor other category is essentially going to be a lump sum of any vendor that I just don't need to report on individually.
So that's effectively streamlining the whole process of reporting on vendors at the detailed level in Cube. Anything that isn't relevant to look at individually, I can map in this way.
But Cube also allows you to set up mapping rules to streamline that process even further. We can click into this mapping rules section here, and you'll see that I can establish mapping rules on any of my dimensions that are coming in from Intact.
On the vendor side, I could pick a rule like map to existing. If I want every new vendor coming in from Sage to be mapped to that vendor other, I could set up that rule at a holistic level.
Or if I want every new vendor coming from Sage to establish a new vendor on the Qube side, I could also pick create new, and this will ultimately send all of those new vendors to this all vendors roll up, and we're gonna get individual new dimensions on the Qube side.
So I wanted to highlight that concept first because this ties back to that play number one, which is all about centralizing your vendor level data from your ERP, your AP systems, and any other data source that you have in one source of truth.
Cube is serving as that data model and that repository for all of that disparate information.
And now what you'll see in a moment here is that we can start playing around with that data in different ways for planning purposes.
Before I start diving into my planning model, though, I wanna just showcase how I've established my planning scenarios in queue.
Right now, at the end of the year, I've already established my twenty twenty six budget, and this has been locked down. It's been approved by all of the c suite. We're ready to go with that budget. So what I've done on the Cube side is I've loaded that budget to a specific scenario.
If we scroll down in these budget scenarios here, you're gonna see my vendor level planning scenarios, and you're gonna see here my vendor budget f y twenty six listed here. You'll notice that there's a block on that budget here, which effectively means this is a lockdown scenario that nobody is going to be able to make changes to anymore.
However, there were a few updates to some spend categories that just hit my desk, and I need to start encountering those into one of my forecasts. I wanna start baking in those changes to a more dynamic plan. And rather than having to write those over my budget, what I can do in Qube is I can make a duplicate copy of that locked budget and call it a forecast or whatever I want to name it. In my case, I clicked copy, and I called this vendor forecast base case.
And this is ultimately going to be where I'm writing all of those updates back to. And now we'll be able to start comparing and contrasting the two scenarios side by side.
So with all of that background context here, let's dive into what an actual kind of systematized template might look like from a vendor spend perspective.
I'm gonna go ahead and open up this template here, and I'll close out of the sidebar for right now just so you get the full view.
And anytime you're planning for vendor expenses or any other type of budgeting or forecasting, you have tons of options for how to do that in Q. You can perform all of that planning work right in a spreadsheet, whether it's Excel, g Sheets, on a Mac, or on a PC, and you can also perform all of that planning work right in the Qube platform itself.
We're gonna be spending most of our time planning today in Excel, but I will showcase a couple of examples of how we can report back in the Qube workspace to sort of review all of our impacts to our financial models.
But, again, Cube gives you that flexibility to work where you're most comfortable. So, typically, a finance professional is going to be most comfortable working in spreadsheets, so that's where I'm working today.
And in my case, I'm maybe the head of FP and A for this organization, and I've established this template here.
Now what you'll see in this template is that we have our accounts that we want to plan for, and these are all OpEx accounts like paid ads, promotional items. We also have things like software, office supplies. We can expand some of these other ones here and see more generic things like facilities and rent and whatnot.
But nested alongside all of those accounts is our vendor dimension. So we can see here that we've got our list of vendors that are relevant for each of these expense categories, and Qube gives us that flexibility to plan not just at that GL level, but also at that more granular vendor level when we have that set up as one of our dimensions.
Now a few other best practices that I've set up here in this template that make it more dynamic and easy to use across the organization is I have established this vendor column here as a pick list.
The reason why I did that is because anytime other department heads might be collaborating in this template, I don't want them to be able to just write whatever they want in that vendor column because that text that they're inputting might not match a dimension that I actually have established and loaded data to in queue.
So I want to keep this as kind of a structured list of the key vendors that we're allowed to plan for. And anytime one of my budget owners wants to plan for a new vendor, they can come to me first, and we can add that into the queue and get the template updated accordingly.
Additionally, there's other drop downs here that allow us to select which scenario we want to be planning within. Today, I've selected my vendor budget, f y twenty six, which, as mentioned before, is my lockdown final budget.
But, again, today, I need to start making some adjustments to my forecast after we have some updated spend decisions.
So what I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna open up my Qube sidebar, and you'll see here once this sidebar loads that this template has already been connected to my Qube where all of my data resides.
Qube is picking up which scenarios and time periods I have in the column headers, my vendors, accounts, and other dimensions down the rows.
And now if I wanna start planning in that forecast scenario, all I have to do here is select it from this list. I'll type vendor forecast, base case, and we're first going to collect our data that is already living in that scenario.
When I click fetch here, you're going to see a big change take place in this template. All of this text here that is currently black was the data that was assigned to that vendor budget that was finalized.
But now all of that cell text just turned blue. And what that means for me is I'm able to actually modify this information and make changes to the data in myCUBE for this specific scenario because it hasn't yet been locked down in the system.
So what I'm gonna change today is going to be a very basic example.
Maybe we're having a board meeting in January of twenty twenty six, and we wanna order a few custom Stanley mugs from Staples that have our nice cube logo on them for all of our board members.
So in my promotional items here, what I'm gonna do is select that Staples vendor. So I can either scroll through this list. I can type in Staples and pick it.
I'll say Stanley Muggs for board of directors, and we're gonna go ahead and throw in our expense here in January. Maybe it's one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars.
When I make that edit here, all I have to do to sync this back to my vendor forecast is use this publish data button in the right hand sidebar. When I click publish data, Qube is going to sync with the change that I just made, and it's going to load that twelve fifty back to my promotional items account, the Staples vendor, and to that vendor level forecast.
Now to actually review the impact of that spend change across other reports, I can navigate over to a multitude of different ways of analyzing this.
This first report here that I'm gonna showcase is my vendor spend report, and we're comparing our base forecast against that finalized budget that we preceded and that we set behind the scenes.
You can see this full list of all of our vendors here. We're performing a variance analysis at the monthly and the year to date level and even tracking what our remaining budget is across those vendors at the year to date perspective.
So now that I just made that change to the Staples vendor, which is here on row thirty four, I'll be able to fetch out this data, and you should see a variance of twelve fifty populate at that monthly and that year to date level, and we can now see that we're a bit over budget here on that vendor.
So very simple example, but I wanted to highlight this first just to show how simple it is to start syncing those changes back to Qube. But I also just wanted to highlight really some of those key ways of streamlining your templates and making them as dynamic and driver based as possible.
But we're gonna take this a step further here and check this out at the kind of financial level. We have another report here set up that is looking at our operating expense accounts at the total vendor level. And, again, we pushed in data to our promotional items account. So if we see that on our report, we should be able to fetch this back and view that same twelve fifty variance taking place on row twenty eight.
And, again, this is just a small slice of my p and l, but this would also be reflected on my full income statement. This would show any other impacts across our other financial statements like our cash flow, balance sheet, what have you.
But let's take this into a little bit more of a complex example. Going back to my OpEx by vendor template here, I have another use case where I want to start planning for some increased expenses for a vendor that I already was foreseeing expenses for this year.
Our Salesforce vendor here just came back to us and told us that we're gonna see a ten percent price hike in twenty twenty six, unfortunately, and we need to start factoring that into our forecast.
We weren't informed of this in time to incorporate it into our budget, but what we can do now is we can reference last year's actual data and perform any calculations and logic on top of that to impact our forecast.
So as you just saw me expand these columns here, you'll notice that I'm also pulling in my historical actuals at the vendor level. We can see that we were charged a thousand dollars per month for Salesforce last year.
But in twenty twenty six, we're gonna see that ten percent price hike.
So to increase that price here for this forecast season, we're just gonna create a simple Excel formula. We're gonna say equals last year in January times one point one, and we should get that eleven hundred dollars. And we can now drag out that formula for the remainder of the year.
And, again, once we make that change, all we have to do to sync that back to Cube is use that publish data button, and Cube is going to adjust that Salesforce software expense for us in the system. It's gonna tie that into that vendor forecast. And now if we go back to our vendor BVA, you should see on this Salesforce line that increase in our expenses hitting that forecast. So you'll see a hundred dollars in January, hundred dollars Jan year to date. But if we roll this forward to December, you'll see that increase to twelve thousand dollars in those year to date columns.
So, again, you can really perform any type of dynamic logic that you want to across your templates, and it doesn't necessarily have to be done in the spreadsheet. There's a ton of different ways that we don't really have time to show off today that you can establish drivers in the back end of Qube. You can set up formulas and calculations on your Qube accounts as well to perform adjustments just like this.
We'll send you a short video that highlights some of those key concepts after today's session, but we do see a lot of our customers tending to lean towards the spreadsheet approach because it grants them the flexibility to really design things however they want to.
With that being said, I'm gonna show off one other kind of dynamic driver based calculation for calculating our vendor spend on this vendor allocations tab.
Now I received a question from one of our customers prior to this call about how do we start allocating our vendor spend across something like departments.
So I built up this example here to show that off. And to explain this a little bit, what I want to do is I want to push a vendor expense, in this case, it's going to be Slack, across all of my different departments based upon those departments' percentage of headcount. So if sales makes up twenty five percent of our headcount, we want twenty five percent of that Slack expense to be allocated to that department.
So what I'm gonna do here first is I'm gonna fetch my department level headcount in this first section by using Qube. All I have to do here is click fetch data, and Cube is going to populate these cells here pertaining to my department level headcount. We're gonna see that month over month, we've got a pretty steep increase in our headcount in the sales department. Other departments tend to taper off a bit further here, and we're getting that total row here so that we can perform our headcount percentage calculation.
Beneath that, I've driven that percentage headcount calculation here by simply taking our headcount. So we're taking that ten FTEs in the sales department for January and dividing it by that total of fifty seven, and we're running that same calculation month over month, department by department.
Now to actually drive that vendor spend into all of these departments, we have to first input our assumption around the total annual expense for Slack.
Maybe Slack is a hundred and twenty thousand dollars for the total year, so we're gonna go ahead and make that entry here. And you can design your templates in ways that make it even clearer where people are supposed to make inputs and where people are supposed to be fetching. But in my case, I'm inserting that hundred and twenty k in this total annual expense.
And now if we start to scroll down, you're going to see my cube published section is now filled out with values.
Now the way I've calculated these values is I'm simply taking that cell c seven, so that hundred and twenty thousand dollars, dividing it by twelve, so month over month, and then I'm multiplying it by that allocation percentage that we're getting from the headcount by department.
So we're multiplying that hundred and twenty thousand dollars, dividing it by twelve times that seventeen point five percent to get about seventeen hundred dollars for the sales department, and this is going all the way throughout the year department by department.
And, ultimately, I want this to impact my software account here in that Slack vendor. And so now that I've made that change, all I have to do is publish that change to Qube. We're gonna go ahead and flip to our allocation publish range. Neat thing about Qube is you can have multiple different ranges on the same spreadsheet. We're gonna click apply, and we're gonna go ahead and click publish data.
Qube is now going to sync with all of this information. It's going to store it in our scenario. And in this case, this scenario is a copy of my original vendor budget. And now if we wanna take a look at a p and l variance report, we can do just that. This is my entire p and l here down the rows comparing our original vendor budget against that v two. If we scroll down to that software account here, you're gonna see that once I fetch out my data, we will have a variance at the software level of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
And now if we wanna slice this by a specific department, Qube gives us the ability to slice and dice however we want to. If I wanna take a peek at just the sales department, I can refetch, and we should see that perfectly allocated amount of twenty thousand dollars hitting the sales department, and all of our other accounts have refreshed accordingly.
So that's kind of the allocation methodology that we see a lot of our customers setting up and having tons of success with because the key value of Cube is that we're not limiting you to a rigid structure or format for building this. You have the same flexibility that spreadsheets will offer you, but the power of a consolidated data model behind the scenes, summing up your data, tallying everything across your dimensions, and giving you instant access to report after the fact.
Last couple of quick things that I'll highlight here before we start, covering some questions is a lot of times we get asked about how do I start incorporating net new vendors into my reports when they've been added to queue. For example, this report here looks at a list of all of my vendors that actually have expense data in my forecast and in my budget.
We've got this total vendors line here beneath it, which is a parent dimension in cube that's automatically summing everything up. But we also have this check beneath it that's looking at whether the total of these vendors here actually matches that all vendors row.
We can see here that it doesn't match. This is two point three million, but the all vendors is two point eight million. So, clearly, we're missing a few vendors in this report.
Now a recent feature that Qube has just launched is dynamic ranges, which gives Qube the ability to automatically insert any net new child dimensions to your existing reports.
This report has dynamic ranges turned on. So if I go ahead and click fetch data, you're gonna see a prompt here that's going to ask me, your range includes parent dimensions with newly added children in Cube. These child rows will be inserted on fetch. Do you want to proceed?
I'll click proceed. Cube is going to insert any additional rows. It's also gonna auto collapse any rows that don't have data. And we're now going to see this foots message here at the bottom that's telling us all of these vendor level rows actually match that total vendor line.
And final piece I'll highlight here is that once your report looks good to go, you've made sure that all of your vendors are incorporated, you can now distribute this either from a spreadsheet directly or right back in the Qube workspace.
In my case today, I set this up as a queue web report by simply highlighting my entire formatted report, including the borders and all of the headers.
Down in the spreadsheet sidebar, I created a web report already by simply saving this as a new report.
And now when I click view report, this is going to take me right back to the Qube workspace where we're gonna see this report manifest. We'll see the report fetch. We're going to get access to all those same variance outputs, and we're even getting that calculated check that we set up in the spreadsheet.
If I delete a cell, you'll see that error message again, but I can easily refetch, get that data back. We'll see that it fits. And if I wanna slice and dice by different departments, like maybe just looking at marketing today, I can easily do that just like I can within the spreadsheet environment.
So we covered a lot of ground here today, but the four kind of key plays, again, are centralizing that data in Cube, ensuring that everything is mapped to one source of truth in the system. We've highlighted how to plan at the vendor level and how to build your templates in a really streamlined way to make sure people aren't, pushing data to erroneous, misnamed vendors.
And finally, we also discussed how to make vendor decisions with full financial visibility. Once you have the full picture into how your spend is broken down by vendor or by department, you're able to really perform your FP and A your way with the clearest picture possible.
So I hope this was super helpful, but I will pass it back to Rocky to start reading off some questions that came up.
Dynamic ranges. You I feel like you just dropped a bombshell in the middle. That launched to yesterday?
Yesterday. Yes. Yes. We had a newsletter out to our customers yesterday, so brand new feature here. Get to see it in action today.
Lovely. I'll start off with Edgar. Is there a separate vendor scenario?
And by scenario, it means company forecast. And does it tie back to the overarching company scenario slash forecast? Yeah.
That's a really great question. You can set it up in a lot of different ways.
In my case, just for my demo purposes, I have my vendor planning all performed in a separate vendor forecast. So if you take a peek at my cube again, you'll be able to see that my scenario dimension has a breakdown of just high level budgets that are mainly at the GL level, but we also have some of our vendor scenarios here that are at that vendor perspective.
You could also plan at the vendor level at your total kind of GL level budget, and those specific accounts that are impacted by vendors would just have further visibility than your other GL accounts.
Or what we also see our customers do sometimes is they'll maintain a separate vendor scenario and a separate top level budget, and then they'll create a parent on top of those two scenarios to essentially sum them up in the system.
So there's a multitude of ways to do it. It really kinda depends on what's gonna feel easiest for your team and how much you want to kind of compartmentalize those two scenarios.
Thank you. Is there a limit to the amount of vendors you can add?
There's no limitation. However, in any system, it's always best to be cognizant of overloading the system with too much information.
For example, you know, I might have fifty vendors that are Amazon, Amazon dot com, Amazon Inc, Amazon Global. And on the Cube side, it doesn't make sense to overwhelm the system with those added fifty vendors.
So that's where mapping is really key. When we're pulling in our data from our ERP, we could take those fifty vendors and just push them into one Amazon vendor on the Cube side.
But, no, you can have hundreds, thousands of vendors if you want to, but, you know, it's always easier to work with a system that has a more streamlined set of dimensionality.
Congratulations if you have thousands of vendors, and also sorry. Yes. That's why we're here. That's why we're here.
You got any questions, pop them in the q and a. Taylor, with the Slack integration, the AI questioning, is it simple for I'm not a I'm not an FP and A person. I'm a marketing person. For me to ask questions about vendors via Slack?
Totally. Yes. So whether you're in Slack, whether you're in Microsoft Teams, or whether you wanna access our AI analyst right in the cube work space, you can ask questions about any slice of your data, and that includes vendors. As long as you have vendors set up as one of your key slices of data in your Cube, you can say, how did my vendors spend from last quarter compared to this quarter?
And Cube will think about that for a minute. It's going to compile that data according to which accounts were impacted by vendor spend, and it will ultimately pull a time based analysis comparing last quarter to this quarter. And you can do that in Slack as well. I don't have my Slack, chatbot open right now, so I'm showing it in the cube workspace.
Yeah. We, quintillion. There's a quintillion number of data cells that our AI searches. And as you say, as you can see, everybody, it takes about twenty to forty seconds.
But The accuracy is is a hundred percent, which is good.
Yep. Hunter Hall's got a question. Is it difficult to set up this template slash, are there any prebuilt templates? Really nice leading question.
Yes. Excellent question. So first off, no. It's not difficult at all to set up one of these templates. In fact, we could build it from scratch right now in about two minutes. I won't bore you all with that process. But to show you kind of the nitty gritty behind the scenes, all I had to do to build up this template was just make sure that I'm incorporating all of the dimensional intersections that Qube is gonna store data in.
Qube, like any FP and A system that's designed in this multidimensional model, needs to store data across all of your dimensions. So in my case, I simply inserted columns here targeting my account dimension, the department that I wanna push into, my entity dimension.
For dimensions that maybe aren't pertinent to OpEx level vendor planning, we can always just push in data to a product other or market other dimension. But as long as all of those dimensions are targeted in your spreadsheet, all you have to do to get this template connected to your Qube is highlight it. Once we highlight our template, we select our range, and Qube starts picking up those dimensions and allowing you to push and pull your data.
But for that segue portion too, I will be sending this template after today's webinar for anybody to utilize to poke around in and explore. And, of course, you know, if you wanna get this up and running for your own cube model, you'll have to map in your dimensions to these rows, but we are also always available from a customer success perspective to assist you with that process too.
Love that.
I'm gonna leave the leave the room open for a few more moments. If there's any other questions, pop them in the q and a.
We have an anonymous attendee asking, will dynamic ranges also work in Cube online reports?
Great question. So, yes, the answer is yes. They will eventually. Currently, they are not integrated with the online web reports because we wanted to establish those web reports as kind of the the basics first to get them up and running and ready for people to use as quickly as possible. But, eventually, yes, dynamic ranges will work right within those web reports, and anything that you're used to doing within spreadsheet driven cube reports will also be reflected in those web reports.
Thank you. And at least one more from Andrea. Do you think there's a way to set up a template where I can validate that the vendors were booked under the correct budgeted department?
Oh, yeah. That's a great question. We would probably wanna take a peek further at what your kinda current process is for validating whether they're budgeted correctly. But, you know, that's absolutely possible. I think a really good way of, you know, performing that would be running vendor budget versus actuals comparisons to see sort of, you know, where vendors were hitting in your GL from your ERP, comparing that against the spend that you were projecting for the budget season, and seeing where any mismatches might happen. But we would be happy to chat with you further about that to kinda see what your current setup looks like.
Thousand percent. Gonna read this one live from Summer. We will pull the vendor from the accounting system then to a mapping sheet then to a vendor level report, question mark, trying to understand the setup process.
Yeah. Yeah. So that's basically the concept of it. The the mapping sheet, though, is completely automated behind the scenes. So, basically, what's gonna happen on the Cube side you know, I was doing this in a fairly manual way to show you sort of the the back end setup.
But on the Qube side, you'll be able to set up scheduled imports from your source systems, and those imports will target your data into Qube on a nightly or weekly cadence. And if you've set up mapping rules too, Cube is gonna automatically understand how to feed in any net new vendors that came from your ERP. If you want more control over that process, though, you can always individually edit your mapping here and pick vendor by vendor how you want things to flow in.
But, again, as soon as that data is loaded into your cube dimensionality, you now can fetch and publish as you please in the spreadsheets or in the cube workspace.
Thank you. I'm gonna ask you one more one more Yeah. Fun one to see if we have any more questions.
What's your favorite Excel shortcut, Taylor?
Oh, I really love control shift plus to add new rows or to add new columns. It just helps you fly through template updates so much quicker.
And control z, of course. Everyone loves control z. Being able to undo your mistakes is is key.
And that's that's my safety net. Yes.
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for the time and information that that you've bespoke and and certainly answering these questions live. Again, everyone will follow-up with the recording, this recording that you're hearing now, the slides, as well as resources such as the template that Taylor app Taylor told you about and the vendor planning video, for more different ways to to slice this whole thing.
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Thank you, everyone.