Snapshot of Blackthorn
Integrations
Key Challenges Faced
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Manual data entry and consolidation from multiple, fragile spreadsheets and ERPs.
A one-member finance team—trying to balance financial reporting, planning, and “everything everywhere all at once”.
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No time for strategic data analysis and dealing with the actual operational side of the company’s finances.
For Peter Zha, Head of Finance & FP&A at Funraisin, the biggest challenge was to find the right balance between strategic priorities and financial reporting and modeling tasks, especially as a finance team of one. When he joined the company, he inherited an FP&A process that was heavily dependent on spreadsheets and manual workflows.
Funraisin is a growing startup operating across Australia, the UK, and the US, which meant that Peter had to manually consolidate expenses from different ERPs for each location every month. Most startups and smaller companies use accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero, which is what Funraisin was using. The problem is, they don’t really support multi-entity consolidation natively. Typically, users have to create a new account for each entity, which adds significant complexity to the task of consolidation.
Peter had to spend a few hours every month manually stitching together data from disparate systems into a single spreadsheet so he could reconcile all of it. This process was extremely tedious because different entities have different data sources and all of them have to be tracked and consolidated at the end of the month.
As is often the case with manual workflows, this process was also prone to errors. Mapping fields across entities and handling intercompany eliminations required constant oversight, especially with fluctuating exchange rates and changing business dimensions. Between the painstaking, time-consuming nature of the work and the need for constant oversight, manual data consolidation was simply not a scalable process.
Peter also found that the monthly reporting cycle and FP&A processes he was responsible for required a huge amount of time, especially for a one-person finance team. To create his monthly financial reports, he had to start by manually consolidating data from all three of the company’s entities into a single, massive spreadsheet. Then, he had to do a budget vs. actuals (BvA) analysis on all of that, including monthly and year-to-date vs. actuals, to generate the relevant insights.
Also, since Funraisin’s FP&A processes were entirely dependent on the fragility—and good graces—of Google spreadsheets, it often felt like playing roulette. A single cell modification or formula edit could break the entire model.
In addition to the work required for reporting, like more finance leaders, Peter often received ad hoc questions from stakeholders asking for a “number” they needed, usually for decision making or some other purpose. As any finance professional can attest to, such requests can seem deceptively simple to the stakeholders making them. For Peter, however, almost every request meant logging into multiple systems, extracting the data, and then manipulating it before being able to deliver on the request.
The whole process was slow and inefficient, leaving very little time for Peter for strategic data analysis or building financial models—that is, dealing with the actual operational side of the company’s finances.
Funraisin’s revenue model is a unique combination of the traditional SaaS subscription model and a percentage-based fee on donations processed through the platform—the latter being highly seasonal.
Peter needed a tool that was flexible and intuitive enough to let him build and own the company’s revenue model and financial plan, incorporating seasonal curves based on historical data of the donation patterns, as well as resolve his other, very real FP&A and financial reporting pain points.
He was already familiar with FP&A tools in general and had already explored Drivetrain as a potential vendor, going through the entire procurement process at another startup before his move to Funraisin. So Drivetrain immediately felt like a good fit.
Here’s why:
Within just four weeks of signing the contract and onboarding, Peter had achieved almost 90% of the functionality he was looking for in Drivetrain—his financial model was fully implemented on the platform and preliminary reporting was up and running, ready for use.
Peter said Drivetrain has fundamentally changed his quality of life at work. Before Drivetrain, his work days were chock full of repetitive, manual tasks around financial reporting, planning and analysis, and day-to-day admin.
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The main thing about Drivetrain that I've really liked, even in the journey, was just the quality of life and living where your customer is.
Now, instead of being consumed with manual workflows or clunky spreadsheets, Peter relies on Drivetrain to manage all the things that used to take him hours of tedious work. This has freed up his time to level up and focus his energies on more strategic, high-impact work that adds value to the business and makes his role worthwhile.
Drivetrain’s robust integration capabilities made it easy to consolidate all the relevant data from all the different systems Peter was working with across Funraisin’s three entities while safeguarding data integrity for both FP&A and the accounting teams for each.
Drivetrain’s self-service feature and intuitive UI also empowered Peter to manage data mapping, reconciliation, and analysis—however he wanted to—reducing dependency on the support teams and giving him more autonomy over the entire platform as well as the FP&A process.
This freed up his headspace to focus on the operational side of the business. Peter now has the time to think more deeply about the different assumptions in his model. He’s also been able to explore Drivetrain’s capabilities for scenario planning and what-if analysis to plan for business growth and have contingencies in place—allowing him to become a more strategic and effective finance leader.
“So, for me, the model is what we want, but the more important point is how do we get there? I feel like there's a huge space where I think a lot of companies are just kind of making it up as they go. The operational element is really valuable—Drivetrain not only does the output and sort of the planning side, but also provides a blueprint to finance teams to become more operational by automating all the manual tasks.”
Before Drivetrain, the monthly, quarterly, and annual BvA calculation and variance analysis was a laborious manual process. And stakeholder requests for data compounded that. Every request required at minimum, 15 minutes just to extract the data from whatever system or systems it resided in and then more time to work with it to make it shareable.
While 15 minutes may not seem like a big deal, those 15 minutes add up to a pretty big chunk of time and can hijack other work you need to get done. Before you know it, half a day has passed while you were busy chasing numbers and answering requests.
“With Drivetrain, common functionality is literally just a button. I love how common features are inbuilt into the UI and it works intuitively, which I love. That’s some of the key differentiators. You've made an application that's pretty flexible, almost Excel-like, but then you've combined that with intuitive buttons that don’t exist in Excel. If I wanted to create a monthly report that compares my quarter-to-date vs. my budget, you just click a button and the stuff is done.”
Drivetrain turned a 15-minute reporting “process” into a 30-second exercise with automated data consolidation, mapping, and analysis from disparate spreadsheets and systems into a single source of truth. This automation not only eliminated the tediousness of copy-pasting numbers from different spreadsheets or multiple logins into different systems, but also improved the accuracy of financial reporting.
Drivetrain has been instrumental in helping Peter implement a strategic approach to Funraisin’s finance function in two ways:
“Communicating with data has been my favorite part of Drivetrain because it's helping me level up my career in a sense of my knowledge of how we need to operate effectively in order to get the best outcome for the organization.”
While currently a work in progress, this shift in the process and mindset across the organization will be easier with Drivetrain. With the enabling technology in place, Peter is now able to facilitate cross-functional collaboration and better decision-making across the organization—evolving his role from being primarily a gatekeeper of Funraisin’s data and finances to becoming a more strategic and effective finance leader.
I like Drivetrain so much that if I ever move companies, I'm going to be like, hey, we really need this tool because it's a real game changer!
Head of Finance and FP&A, Funraisin
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