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When Idaho-based pet health and wellness company PetIQ was preparing for their IPO in 2015, they looked to the auditing expertise of Pat Jones who joined them as their Corporate Controller and “central point of accounting.”
After PetIQ went public in 2017, Pat had to build “robust” Excel spreadsheets to consolidate their first acquisition—from NetSuite into Sage X3—but that consolidated data wasn’t accurate enough and the process wasn’t sustainable. It took more than three months to fully consolidate.
Six months later, with a second acquisition looming, Pat and their treasurer—anticipating further acquisitions on the horizon—decided to look for a financial consolidation solution. Due to the absence of a strong internal IT team, Pat required a solution that would empower self-sufficiency and adapt to future use cases. In light of this, Pat chose Vena for its Excel-based planning flexibility, long-term scalability and the exceptional technical expertise of the Vena Experts during implementation.
With their IT team’s SQL queries—for the ETL (extract, transform, load) process—malfunctioning, and their second acquisition quickly approaching, they encountered a common dilemma.
“At the time, the choice was: Do we want to be fast and have a consolidation tool up and ready by the end of the year? Or, do we want to do it perfectly with all the bells and whistles in detail?” Pat explained. “We chose fast, and our Vena implementation consultants supported that, as part of a staged adoption approach.”
With Vena’s automated data consolidation and ETL connector, the data was accurate and fully consolidated by month two. Pat appreciated the implementation team’s educational approach.
“I really enjoyed the way Shad and Andrew pushed to teach—not just tell me what we needed. They were big on teaching.”
And after launching Vena’s “robust, user-friendly” automated templates, Pat secured buy-in from PetIQ’s 55 budget owners. “Our budget owners are fully in command of their budget,” said Pat. The templates—which provide a consistent yet flexible and intuitive budgeting experience—have ignited collaboration between Pat’s finance team and PetIQ’s budget owners.
Previously, PetIQ created one static annual budget and ad hoc forecasts informed by only qualitative feedback. Now, with a real-time single source of truth, along with historical budgets stored securely in Vena, Pat has implemented a nine-month rolling forecast. It’s informed by data-driven feedback from PetIQ’s budget owners. Now, Pat aggregates numbers quickly, views them in real time and then—in seconds—rebudgets and reforecasts.
“The integration is pretty seamless. My controller goes in and changes the date so we pick up the next month, pushes the button, the data loads, and that's kind of it,” said Pat.
Since that second acquisition, PetIQ has made three more. Every acquisition brought unique requirements, leaving the team to manage additional complexity. With “essentially zero” IT support internally, Pat pursued Vena’s Expert Managed Services Plus (EMS+), a tailored and unique experience that provided PetIQ with two dedicated Vena Experts, Frank Zheng and Alex Young, to serve as extensions to his team and maximize Vena’s impact on the organization.
Frank and Alex supported Pat’s team in enhancing PetIQ’s financial consolidation process in each acquisition, gaining more data granularity and learning new best practices each time.
Pat recalled that Frank coached the PetIQ team—in just one phone call—through the consolidation of their largest acquisition.
Before Vena, PetIQ’s 55 budget owners had budgets in three ERPs. As a result, they received three reports and budgeted in three disconnected templates. Alex created a consolidated transaction database—for PetIQ’s millions of point-of-sale transactions running through NetSuite—so now their budget owners have only one template to analyze and can make holistic decisions.
“They’d been consolidating data from three separate ERP models into a fourth, but that new one only brought high-level intersectional data,” explained Alex. “I created a process that consolidated the transaction-level details from those three models into the new model. It gives their team more granular data so they can make decisions around their pet products and vet services with deeper data.”
Alex also created controls for data flow so Pat’s team can choose which datasets from the three ERP models they wish to include or exclude from the consolidated model.
Today, Pat is a senior vice-president at PetIQ. Five divisional controllers report to him. Their tax and payroll functions, along with some FP&A activities, are also in his remit. With Vena’s fast financial consolidations, no SEC filings have been submitted late, and especially important to PetIQ’s “central point of accounting,” their audits have been clean.
Pat recently launched a fixed asset template for their budget owners as CapEx has become a higher priority. He wants to report cash flow quarterly, so he plans to integrate eight disparate spreadsheets into Vena.
He’s also begun operationalizing their workforce data in Vena to plan HR expenses and strategies in better alignment with PetIQ’s business-wide financials and objectives. With Vena’s customized user permissions, what had been an opaque workforce planning process has become transparent across the organization—all while protecting their sensitive employee data stored safely in Vena.
Before implementing Vena’s task automation and streamlined workflows, PetIQ closed their months on the 24th. Now, they close on the 12th—a 12-day improvement. With more time freed, they’ve produced a consolidated balance sheet that has delivered actionable insights across the business faster.
“The biggest impact has really been on the timeliness and the ability to generate high-quality data and financial reports.” Pat said. “I'm a big fan of being able to self-serve our data and our systems. And actually, this is one of our new core values at PetIQ: agility—which Vena very much helps us enable. We don't do the same thing every month. And Vena has very much enabled that agility.
And the best part? PetIQ achieved this without adding headcount.
“The most telling thing is the ability to do everything with kind of the same staffing,” said Pat. “We don't have a closing consolidation team today. It's in Vena. When I joined, we had two ERPs. Today, we have five. When I joined, we did about 200 million in sales. This year, we're going to do a billion.”