Finance Needs More Clarity

The client’s finance department had the advantage of talented analysts already on staff and a solid Snowflake data warehouse to store data. However, analyst time was mostly occupied with doing manual work in Excel rather than using their extensive knowledge more artfully to discover innovative financial insights for the business.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were not standardized between systems, and many more KPIs than truly necessary were being used and lost their impact. They also wanted a speedier turnaround for their own clients regarding invoices and billing. Specifically, they wanted greater insight into the “order to cash” process. ‍

Without a clear view of cash flow throughout the organization, the finance team couldn’t identify where money was tied up or optimize contract terms and due dates.

Setting Foundational KPIs

Our first priority was to help the client develop clearly defined and visualized KPIs to give the business concrete objectives to meet. By linking high level operational goals with these KPIs and working backward, we determined a set of requirements that would allow them to support the business at many levels of management. Tableau was chosen as the business analytics solution for data visualizations with real-time operational data reporting in Salesforce.

Together, we determined that this project would be their first step toward enabling predictive analytics capabilities in the treasury, FP&A and accounting departments, and helped them target specific goals for what they would like to predict. We also helped them narrow their KPIs from 70 to about 19, targeting data of vital importance to the business to offer more clarity and insight. The work with this client is currently ongoing within incremental projects that deliver quick wins and allow the client to keep moving down the path to more predictive analytics capabilities.

We’ve helped the client reduce the amount ofovernight loans they had to take because they can now predict cash flow, how much and when clients will pay, and how much vendors will bill. Eliminating those loans has saved them a significant amount of interest.

-Bill McLellan, Solutions Architect for Onebridge

Clear Answers About Business Performance

Data can now be used to more accurately evaluate how the business is performing both in the past and today, based on the KPIs Onebridge helped the client identify. Business users now know which factors impact performance and where to target their efforts to meet key goals – including improving cash flow throughout the organization. The client has also created an entire department devoted solely to data quality based on what they learned from the Onebridge team, to guide them as they continue down the path to heightened data literacy and capabilities.

To learn more about Onebridge can support your organization, Contact Us here.