Change was already underway at Thomas International when James Leisk joined as FP&A Manager in July 2019. In fact, it was one of the reasons he was brought on in the first place. A private equity firm had acquired the rapidly growing talent assessment platform provider just a year before and was hungry for the data, reporting and robust budgeting and planning that’s a natural part of the FP&A function. The problem was that until James had arrived, Thomas International didn’t actually have an FP&A function.

“My role was very much around coming in and building planning processes, building the reporting and the KPI analysis—all of the stuff that was needed operationally within the business by the management team,” James explains. “Our investors were also really eager to get their hands on this kind of information and insight from the business.” 

At the time, the finance team was using disparate spreadsheets to execute and manage all of their budgeting and planning processes. James only had to experience one budgeting season to realize the system was problematic.

“It was quite an eye opener for me, seeing the struggle of having to link all of these spreadsheets together and the headache of version control—you’re sending out templates to people, they're sending it back and you're working off Version 9, but they're still looking at Version 7,” James says. “It was really going through that pain that exposed where our weaknesses were and helped support all of the things we were looking to do going forward.” 

The process wasn’t just slow and cumbersome, he realized, but there wasn’t a regular forecasting cadence, accountability was lacking and they had limited collaborative capabilities. So while the finance team was building budgets and creating targets across departments, there was no way to rationalize the numbers and invite every team into the process—making cross-team buy-in difficult to achieve. All of which created a disconnect between Thomas International’s’ finance, sales, customer success and leadership teams.

If he wanted to introduce more sophisticated processes, James realized, he’d need to find a more sophisticated solution to support them.

After building up their FP&A processes and completing another budgeting season at Thomas—this time with Vena in place—James has already noticed the new efficiencies and benefits they’ve achieved.

“With Vena, I’m not spending my time reconciling spreadsheets, linking them all together and trying to get the consolidation to work,” he says. “My time is much more value-adding: actually interrogating the assumptions, looking at the data, asking the right questions of the business and understanding the numbers a lot more, as opposed to just checking that all the controls are in place.”

They’ve been able to introduce new KPIs—from the number of new customers and average customer spend, to cash flow and revenue metrics—and achieve stronger data-driven insights from across the business. They’ve also been able to support the company in its overall goals, becoming a true strategic partner within the organization. As the company puts more of a focus on its marketing efforts, for instance, Vena has allowed them to track key marketing metrics such as lead conversions, cost of acquisition and lifetime value. “We're also tracking how our customers are engaging with our platform, which is a really good lead indicator for us of future sales,” James adds. “It lets us identify upsell opportunities.”

As Thomas continues to use Vena to build their FP&A processes, James plans to increase collaboration further by adding new reporting capabilities and to better look ahead through scenario planning. He also expects to save time in future budgeting cycles thanks to the new efficiencies they have in place—all while providing a better flow of information to their investors, individual departments and organization as a whole.