Quantum Metric changes course to accelerate forecasting and reporting with Drivetrain

The Challenge

When we sat down with Andrew De Fanti, Quantum Metric’s FP&A Manager, he shared an interesting story – one that’s become pretty common with SaaS businesses transitioning from Excel or other spreadsheet-based processes. With the steady entry of new tools on the market in the last few years, all promising to simplify and streamline FP&A practices and processes, it can be pretty hard to choose the right one.  

De Fanti said that just prior to his arrival at Quantum Metric, the company invested in a second-generation FP&A tool thinking that it would allow them to create a more robust, detailed model for their financial planning and forecasting.  

Unfortunately, they quickly discovered this was not the case. The platform proved to be very rigid, and the configuration necessary to build financial models extremely complex, which in turn, made it very difficult to troubleshoot when something went wrong. 

And, things went wrong all the time. It was so bad that De Fanti was forced to continue maintaining the company’s original Excel model on the side for more than a year and a half as he struggled to implement the solution they had invested in.

He noted that they were more focused on wrapping up the implementation than ensuring it worked as we wanted. De Fanti said part of the problem was that the solution wasn’t built to accommodate the specific needs of a SaaS company. It was readily apparent that the implementation team could neither understand or effectively model the logic required for SaaS financial planning and forecasting.

“We never even got off the ground,” said De Fanti who was trying to make the implementation work while still maintaining his regular FP&A workload. But with integrations that were breaking down on a weekly basis and a balance sheet that wouldn’t balance, De Fanti knew – something had to give. 

So, he went to his CFO with a proposal, “Give me one month of no work, and I’ll build us a new Excel model.” De Fanti explained that his plan was to use Excel as a stop-gap measure to help the company build its annual plan while he continued to look for a better alternative to the FP&A tool they had been trying but unable to get up and running.  

He found that alternative in Drivetrain.

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The Solution

How Drivetrain Helped

Drivetrain’s onboarding team jumped in quickly to help De Fanti get his data into Drivetrain. Given the difficult experience Quantum Metric had with its previous vendor, the Drivetrain team was only too happy to also take the lead in recreating De Fanti’s model in Drivetrain so he could get up and running faster.

A financial model that simply works (in a fraction of the time)

It wasn’t long before Quantum Metric had a robust and highly detailed financial model fully implemented in Drivetrain. Just to offer a sense of how granular the company’s model is, Quantum Metric has seven CXOs that each have different budgets. And even within those, there are additional splits with different budget owners. 

De Fanti said that now, having the company’s model in Drivetrain gives him “extreme confidence” in his forecasting. He also no longer worries about the accuracy of the data. Instead of manually bringing data from different systems into Excel (and introducing the opportunity for error with every upload), he was able to connect Drivetrain to Quantum Metric's Salesforce account to pull in top-line assumptions and to its Netsuite account to bring in actuals data.  

Drivetrain also saves De Fanti an enormous amount of time each month. Because his original financial model in Excel was so big, forecasting was extremely slow, often to the point of crashing. However, in Drivetrain, running the model takes about 20 seconds because the data is always up to date. De Fanti said that before Drivetrain, he was only able to update actuals once a quarter due to the time it would take to get the data out of NetSuite. Now, that data is immediately accessible in Drivetrain because it re-syncs twice a day automatically. 

Drivetrain has also shaved days off the monthly close process. When Quantum Metric’s accounting team closes the books each month, they put together a large file that includes a detailed comparison of budget versus actuals down to the vendor level, along with a flux analysis for the company’s controller & CFO to review. Before working with Drivetrain, this work was taking Quantum Metric’s GL accounting team of four people between 2-3 days, sometimes longer, it now takes 2 hours.

Streamlined financial reporting

While his search for a better solution was driven by the need to streamline the company’s financial model, De Fanti also wanted to streamline his reporting, too. When Quantum Metric started working with Drivetrain, he was using Excel for financial reporting, too, which made compiling all the information they needed each month a pretty heavy lift. 

For example, pulling the data together to create the board deck and individual presentations for every CXO for quarterly reporting had to be done manually. Monthly reconciliation to account for budget vs actuals was also completely manual. 

Having already built the company’s P&L and budget in Drivetrain, De Fanti decided to leverage Drivetrain’s reporting features to automate the budget versus actuals report to support his variance analyses. He also built out a flux by vendor for every single expense category for every department and automated that, too.  

Now, the reporting process that originally took a total of two days of effort time requires less than half a day. With all the necessary data available in real time, the only work left for Quantum Metric’s accounting team to do is to go in and pull out any notes they need for the controller’s package.

Impact

Key Results

• Moved from quarterly re-forecasting to a more frequent re-forecasting with actuals data updating in real-time.
• 8-10 days saved each month on monthly closing.
• Automated variance and flux reporting for each department enabling faster and better decision-making.

Drivetrain has become a game-changer for De Fanti. He explained that as the company’s FP&A Manager, he’s still responsible for the basics, like creating the annual budget for example. Now though, De Fanti says that getting Drivetrain is like gaining an extra teammate in terms of the time saved and the robust analysis he’s now able to do.

De Fanti also sees potential benefits for other Quantum Metric teams as well. He said that after demonstrating Drivetrain to different stakeholders in the company, “other teams started lining up to see how it could make their work easier, whether that be reporting or having better visibility into their data.” 

Now every leader and team in the company has access to Drivetrain and are in various stages of engaging and exploring the platform. One-by-one, De Fanti is building out dashboards for each of them to gain a deeper understanding of their impact on the company’s performance. And, with all the features that Drivetrain provides to support other use cases in addition to his FP&A, De Fanti said, he’s just getting started.