Improving Profitability Management at an AdTech Company
The Situation
A fast-growing digital marketing firm reached a point in its growth where budgeting and forecasting in spreadsheets was no longer providing accurate or actionable information. Due to the sheer volume of customer contracts, sales commissions, vendors expenses, and employee comp models, a solution was needed to drive a better 24-month profitability projection and mitigate manual work. Our Accordion team assisted with software selection, which was driven by the recommendation for single forecasting platform ROI vs. a collection of point solutions.
Services
Revenue Planning
Anaplan Implementation
P&L Forecasting & Reporting
The Execution
- Led sessions to collect business requirements for advance forecasting and to understand client pain points.
- Built a full-scale P&L planning solution with actionable drivers by sourcing data from the client’s CRM, ERP, and HCM.
- Drove better revenue forecasts through modeling logic to handle complex contract stipulations, churn projections, and pipeline opportunities assumptions.
- Improved expense planning by accounting for sales commission expenses, workforce costs by employee, and varied headcount growth plan models.
- Introduced rolling forecasting, scenario modeling, and robust variance analysis.
- Configured near real-time data integrations so that forecasts would be up-to-date based on latest driver data.
- Connected Anaplan to Tableau to support existing BI analysis activities.
The Results
Accordion worked with the client to understand how to address their existing pain points (manual effort, complexity, Excel scalability issues) with a robust and scalable forecasting solution. The resulting model, built in Anaplan, provided a more accurate forecast than the previous collection of spreadsheets used for planning. It also significantly trims the amount of time needed to manually collect and organize source data used as drivers for the forecast logic, which allowed the FP&A team more time for analysis and business planning.
The Accordion team drove real improvement across multiple areas of focus for the client. Below is just a sample of those improvements.
