Improving Budgeting & Implementation KPI Reporting
The Situation
A growth equity fund acquired a rapidly growing workforce management Software as a Service (“SaaS”) business. The Company’s budget had historically been developed with minimal input from business units. There was also limited visibility into the key metrics and goals of the various departments and how they impacted corporate strategic goals. The new CFO required support with developing a more robust budgeting process and implementing a KPI reporting program to track and manage the business.
Services
Stakeholder Reporting & Strategic KPI Enhancement
Budgeting & Forecasting Process Improvement
Actionable Business Analytics
The Execution
Our Accordion team drove rapid implementation of a new budget process and model, which the CFO used to validate, run sensitivity analyses, and present to the Board. During the course of our engagement, we were responsible for:
- Working with Management to develop budget model revenue and expense assumptions
- Gathering and analyzing historical data from disparate systems to validate assumptions
- Re-building the Company’s budget model by department and by region and developing multiple supporting schedules to provide more granular detail for all key business drivers
- Developing budgeting process and departmental templates which could be easily integrated into the Company’s existing financial systems
We also designed, developed, and implemented a monthly KPI reporting package to provide Management and the Board with improved visibility. This included:
- Working with key department heads including Sales, Marketing, Alliances, Professional Services, Product Development, Finance, and HR to assess data availability for the defined KPIs and develop an efficient update process
- Creating custom models to calculate and track the Lifetime Value of a Customer and Customer Acquisition Cost for the enterprise SaaS customer
Ultimately, our Accordion team trained Company staff on the new budget process and KPI reporting model to efficiently transition all tools to staff.
The Results
The Board and Management team realized meaningful benefits from our team’s work, including:
- Detailed, comprehensive (input from all business units) and validated budget used for board approval
- Implementation of a KPI reporting culture with increased visibility into: 1) areas of operational complexity (e.g., professional services, product development), 2) quality of the Sales, Marketing and Alliance pipelines and how to best allocate capital across a mix of geographies and channels, 3) alignment of Senior Management and Board level KPIs with corporate strategic goals