In the past three years, Arcobi recorded a whopping 303% revenue growth. That kind of growth almost always brings with it some growing pains. For Arcobi’s CFO, Scott Neate, that pain had become chronic, flaring up with every monthly close.

With multiple spreadsheets, currency conversion formulas, and two disconnected QuickBooks instances, routine financial management was already difficult. Add to that high-stakes fundraising, investor reporting, and keeping up with due diligence requests, Neate found that his spreadsheet-based processes were becoming increasingly difficult to scale reliably.

Monthly reporting was a highly manual and exhaustive process

Every month, Neate had to export CSVs from two QuickBooks instances, one for Arcobi’s US division and another for its Canada division, then look up and apply historical exchange rates manually to every transaction. Then he had to build out financial statements using complex Excel formulas to produce a consolidated report. He said it was very manual and time-consuming, but it worked well enough. 

The real problem, Neate said, was when it came to fundraising or doing any kind of due diligence outside of the normal business cycle.

“There’d be this swath of requests from bankers or PE firms or whoever. Then, you’re not just consolidating financial statements, you’re consolidating other data. Neate said, “That’s where it became really painful. He explained that when the stakeholder would ask for, say, a revenue list by customer, “Then, you’re taking two data sets. You’re converting one of them into a certain currency, but you don't know what currency rate to use because it's a different period for every customer. It was just a nightmare.”

KPI reporting was equally cumbersome and didn’t tell the whole story

Neate said his process for KPI reporting was similar to the one he used for consolidation and financial reporting: “I’d have to (again) pull a whole bunch of information and spreadsheets from QuickBooks, consolidate them, and then run my KPI analysis, formulas, all of that.” Summing it up, he said, “It was manual. It wasn’t cohesive. It was very painful.”

As with consolidation, the process worked. But working with Excel was so time-consuming, Neate wasn’t able to do his KPI analysis as often as he wanted to. Manually generating KPI reports, sometimes months apart, resulted in several point-in-time “snapshots” with no connective tissue between them. They simply didn’t give Neate any visibility into KPI trends.

While his KPI reports were accurate when he developed them, he knew there was more to the story, but it was hidden in the data. If he could somehow connect the dots, he would be able to provide more strategic insights in his role as Arcobi’s chief financial officer and advisor.

The Solution

When Neate began looking for a solution, he started with The SaaS CFO, Ben Murray’s, Finance and Ops Tech Stack Survey. He evaluated a couple of well-known providers. Ultimately, he rejected both because they were too “Excel-like.”  

When moving from Excel to a dedicated FP&A tool, it’s not uncommon for finance teams or professionals to look for tools that offer more flexibility and modeling features, but with the comfort and familiarity of Excel spreadsheets.

But Neate had a different perspective. He said that, in his experience, FP&A platforms that rely on Excel-based models, plugins, or add-ons don’t work very well, and that they typically drag the performance down quite a bit.

In addition, he said the other department heads at Arcobi didn’t want to have to look through any kind of spreadsheet-like UI to find and review their numbers. That’s when Neate looked at Drivetrain.  

“To be honest, I was initially attracted to the planning function and more so the ability to have my plan in there,” he said, adding that the main thing was to give department heads the ability to collaborate easily, on a cloud-based system as opposed to an Excel spreadsheet.”

With Drivetrain, Neate was able to check both those boxes and a few extra ones to boot. With the platform’s robust close and consolidation features, along with its dynamic dashboards, automated reporting, and more, Neate knew he’d have far more flexibility in how he consolidated, analyzed, and presented financial data. Drivetrain’s connected planning features were icing on the cake.  

Neate knew he’d made the right choice during the onboarding process. It went much smoother than he thought it would, based on his experience with ERPs at other companies. He figured he’d have to spend time getting Drivetrain’s onboarding team up to speed on Arcobi’s business.

Much to Neate’s surprise, the team brought a level of finance and accounting expertise that eliminated all that, making his implementation of Drivetrain faster, “I actually didn’t have to answer any questions about accounting, consolidation, eliminations and foreign currency,” he said, noting that the Drivetrain team had “a foundational knowledge of non-intuitive accounting principles.”

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How Drivetrain Helped

Single source of truth for multi-entity financial reporting

With Drivetrain, Neate has transformed his monthly reporting process. Today, he’s able to access consolidated data for both of Arcobi’s divisions through a single platform, without having to mess with CSV files or figure out what exchange rate applies to this transaction or that one. The painstaking work he used to spend three full days on every month is a thing of the past.  Now, he can get his monthly close done and reports ready in a single afternoon.

Neate has used some of the time he’s saved to build out dynamic dashboards in Drivetrain, tailored for different stakeholders, which has provided compounding benefits. After building a customized dashboard in Drivetrain, the data stays current. So, Neate doesn’t have to update the numbers every month. And with intuitive drill-down capabilities built into Drivetrain’s dashboards, stakeholders can easily explore the data and answer most of their own questions without sending an email. All of this has translated into a lot less work for Neate.

Standardized KPI reporting and time-series visibility

Neate has transformed his KPI reporting, too, with automated calculation and tracking of Arcobi’s KPIs across both divisions. Instead of pulling all the data and manually recalculating every metric in a spreadsheet whenever he could carve out the hours needed to do it, Neate has created standardized report views that provide full visibility into KPI trends over time.

Every KPI is automatically calculated using data that flows into the system via Drivetrain’s QuickBooks integration. Now, Neate has full confidence in his data, and with it automatically consolidated in Drivetrain, he can more easily analyze trends and compare reporting periods. No more searching for different spreadsheets created at different times to calculate this KPI or that one.

Ad hoc requests managed more efficiently with accurate data

One of the most tangible operational shifts has been in how Neate handles stakeholder requests. Today, when a banker or investor asks Neate for a revenue breakdown by customer, he can generate an answer within minutes, as opposed to hours (or sometimes days, depending on the complexity of the request).    

This is where the transition away from Excel has really paid off.

Requests from potential investors and lenders are particularly high-stakes requests, and Neate says Excel just isn’t up to the task, “In January, I was talking to six different banks with six different data requests. I’ve got to say that each one of them would have taken five hours. Excel isn’t sophisticated enough to solve that problem on its own.”

Drivetrain, however, is.

Better business visibility for more insightful decision-making

As a SaaS company, Arcobi's revenue picture involves a lot of interrelated details around individual customers, recurring billing cycles, and exchange rate implications per period.  

Now, with QuickBooks data from both Arcobi divisions flowing automatically into Drivetrain and most of the manual work replaced by automated processes within the platform, Neate has a more reliable view of how the business is actually performing.

Neate said that in one 30-second scan of his data in Drivetrain, he can spot a missing entry or a missed step in the month-end process. And with a quick pull of Arcobi’s HubSpot data, he can look at the pipeline and instantly see how the company is doing from a sales lens.