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Ninety-three tabs on one Excel workbook.
That’s where Max DiPlotti, FP&A Manager at MountainSeed, had to manually key in the real estate consultancy’s actuals. In 2021, it took him one full day each month to update the balance sheet and income statement numbers for MountainSeed’s six entities.
“It was about as antiquated as you could possibly have it, going through each department on a different tab,” he said.
This also made it hard for Max to trust the accuracy of those numbers. Without a granular view of the data, he couldn’t detect when transactions were miscategorized into wrong accounts.
Every time a department, budget owner or leadership requested a report, Max had to create one from scratch and customize it. When he prepared income statements—by product line—for their nine products, he spent three hours in QuickBooks matching transactions to the corresponding product.
This tedious inputting and reporting of unreliable data left no time for confident planning and analysis. Max, then working as a financial analyst, knew that the single Excel workbook wouldn’t enable the business’s growth. Max and his CFO evaluated 15 solutions, shortlisting Adaptive Planning before selecting Vena.
“We wanted to be flexible and create our own reports, create our own everything from scratch. Vena was offering the most flexibility. Vena gives awesome pre-made templates, but it also gives you the ability to make them in your own way. It's nice to be able to integrate it all, without being locked in a box.”
After implementing Vena, Max no longer inputs actuals manually.
“Every single outside source is now something we can just input into Vena with the click of a button,” said Max. “I don't have to worry that it's pulling incorrectly off all the other tabs. When we consolidate all of our entities into one big income statement, it's always accurate.”
Vena helped MountainSeed abandon that antiquated Excel workbook in three weeks—and most importantly, without abandoning their complex revenue model. Max said, “It seemed impossible, but the Vena implementation team actually mirrored the exact look, with every formula matching correctly.”
With automated data consolidation, MountainSeed’s new income statements by product line now update in 12 seconds—down from three hours. The visibility of costs from driver-based modeling and drill-down functionality has also spurred cost savings—Max has cut $40,000 of unnecessary expenses in the last two months alone—and ignited collaboration. This collaboration reaped benefits early: In Mountainseed’s first month using Vena, their forecasted net income saw a variance of less than 1%.
Before Vena, Max and his CFO had set MountainSeed’s budgets. Now, their department heads and other budget contributors are involved in monthly variance analysis and quarterly budgeting.
“Being able to drill down and see what expenses made up the actuals so they know why they're over or under budget—all of that makes our budget owners more comfortable. They're telling me why they're over budget or under budget,” Max said. “All we need as a team is to understand each other. It's hard to get that feeling when you're not as involved in your own budget.”
With Vena, Max has also been able to set up automatic reporting for MountainSeed’s executives.
“We've already improved on every single report we send monthly to the departments, ownership and leadership. All the teams are happier with the reports they're getting now because we have the ability to customize them. They can do their own digging if they want to, or they can just look at the overview.
Every month, Vena has saved MountainSeed’s finance team one full day of inputting actuals, three days of error checking and another day of reconciling their models. And, it no longer takes Max six hours to analyze a single transaction’s impact when modeling sensitivities and scenarios.
In the past, the MountainSeed team reviewed trends just as the next month was about to begin, but now they start trend analysis on the day the books close. Closing five days faster and analyzing performance in real time has also allowed the real estate consultancy company to focus on revenue planning for their nine product lines. Before Vena, MountainSeed planned revenue by analyzing rolled-up data in—as Max described it—“this massive grid of numbers.”
Now, they analyze revenue by individual client, with new insights such as seasonality trends and priority accounts to forecast client retention. They can calculate their profit margins by product line or by product segment to determine where to invest.
“We've had one main product, and now, we have nine revenue-producing products. Putting more resources toward a specific product, or relocating [resources] from what's less profitable—those are going to be the biggest decisions made throughout this year and next year so that we can have more than one main product. We can have three or four because now we can see where the profitability is. Our management can choose to pursue it more aggressively than if we didn't have the comfort of seeing those numbers.”
With integrated forecasting abilities, Max and his team don’t have to implement models for new or expanded products into their main revenue model, thereby preserving forecasting accuracy. And with Vena’s data cube and the ability to forecast multiple scenarios, Max doesn’t need to separate these different revenue models. This has given him greater flexibility amid greater economic uncertainty. He can plan for any eventuality, to better prepare MountainSeed when the market shifts toward a specific scenario.
A granular view of data has not only improved forecasting accuracy and data-driven planning, but it’s also helped MountainSeed’s annual recurring revenue. After implementing Vena, Max immediately detected clients at risk of churning.
Now, MountainSeed—voted as one of the best places to work in Atlanta—is using Vena for compensation planning in their workforce models. Max has added granular headcount data, such as income tax, benefit enrollments, promotions and interdepartmental transfers, to further elevate forecasting accuracy. He’s integrated their workforce data cube with their revenue data cube to improve capacity planning.
Next, MountainSeed’s finance team will integrate their CRM data from Salesforce into Vena, and as Max assumes a larger role in compensation management, he plans to add sales commissions data. He also wants to automate MountainSeed’s 500+ KPI scorecard—currently a manual, four-hour process for him on Tuesday mornings—into Vena, with a priority on sales planning, cash forecasting and headcount changes.
Max originally joined MountainSeed as a sales development representative, but soon after, his leaders recognized his value and moved him into a new role in finance. Since that transition, he’s become a manager.
“I'm a big believer that you have to be in a situation where you can succeed. At MountainSeed, you see that it's a place you can go to grow and become better. When you work in finance, and you have a software like Vena offering you all these possibilities to show what you can do, it's nice to be able to show everything. That's where I got to really set myself apart, and that's where my value got to shine through.”