Enhancing Visibility & Board Reporting for a Software Company
The Situation
A software company selling ERP systems and business applications to the SMB market was acquired by a leading global private equity firm. The Company’s Management and Board had identified a series of value creation strategies to significantly drive growth in the business. However, the ability to quantify and track progress was challenged due to multiple disparate data sources as well as highly manual financial and operational processes – further complicated by numerous add-on acquisitions and a complex business structure.
Services
Stakeholder Reporting & Strategic KPI Enhancement
Actionable Business Analytics
Budgeting & Forecasting Process Improvement
The Execution
Our Accordion team worked with the Senior Management team and Board to review the requirements of the various constituencies for improved performance visibility. From there, we worked alongside the operations, finance, and IT leadership teams to:
- Map data sets, validate and, as required, cleanse data from multiple sources
- Develop automated processes to aggregate data for ongoing reporting needs
By identifying metrics and developing methodologies, we analyzed and reported on key value creation drivers, including:
- Bookings, backlog, and revenue trends
- Organic versus acquisition-driven growth
- Recurring revenue growth
- Cross-sell by increased penetration of business applications across installed base
- Migration of customers from on premise software solutions to cloud-based solutions
- Consolidation of customers from legacy applications to new platform applications
- Upcoming customer renewals and losses
For each reporting area, we developed a cadence and automated processes to generate actionable reports for Management and Board reporting purposes. This included:
- Working with Senior Management and Board to refine reporting outputs
- Developing detailed instructions for each unique analysis and training company personnel on all models and reporting processes
The Results
Ultimately, our Accordion team provided Management with enhanced visibility into the progress of strategic operational and financial initiatives, allowing the Company to make well-informed, data driven decisions. We also developed a series of new exhibits which formed the core of the Board reporting package. The increased visibility has improved the quality of ongoing discussions and alignment between the Management Team and Board.