Fostering Accurate Forecasting with Financial Statement Visibility
The Situation
An American sports and entertainment company that’s part of a large conglomerate required increased transparency when dealing with its financial statements — including the profit & loss statement, cash flow statement, and balance sheet statement. Accordion was engaged to deliver a solution that would allow the Finance team the ability to drill down to the transaction level of detail for each financial statement at event, department, and subsidiary levels, without off-line calculations.
Services
Budgeting/Forecasting Solution Implementation
Reporting & Analytics
The Execution
- Worked closely with the organization’s Finance team to develop a framework that would address the needs of the solution.
- Partnered with Accordion’s NetSuite experts to source all dimensions and transactions, allowing real-time data to flow into each report.
- Leveraged third-party ETL tool, ‘WData’, to create data connections between NetSuite and Anaplan to automate data integrations on a scheduled nightly basis.
- Leveraged third-party ETL tool, ‘WData’, to create data connections between Snowflake and Anaplan to automate data integrations on a scheduled nightly basis.
- Calculated variances between actuals and budget and historical trends which allows finance users to accurately forecast budgets going forward.
- Ensured that this platform enabled employees across functions the capability to access dashboards and insights – with the ability to drill into detail at the individual transaction, slicing by date & time, subsidiary, department, and event.
- Delivered high-level financial reporting for management.
- Developed administrative guide for any system management that outlined data points and the source of those connections.
The Results
With Accordion’s help, the Company achieved its key objective of developing a self-service reporting and analytics platform in Anaplan. Our team automated data feeds into Anaplan, which are now used to calculate financial statements and other relevant metrics with interactive dashboard capabilities. As a result, the Company now has a single source of truth for all of its financials.