Snapshot of Sirion
Integrations
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Key Challenges Faced
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Complex spreadsheet-based workflows with hardcoded formulas were prone to crashing—created versioning chaos that made board reporting difficult.
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Needed enterprise-level FP&A but struggled to find a platform the company’s lean finance team could easily adopt.
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Manually mapping general ledgers and cost allocations across seven entities made multi-entity forecasting complex and the results fragile.
When Sirion implemented NetSuite a few years ago, Yati Agarwal, the company’s Chief Financial Officer, did not anticipate the complexities that ensued. Her lean finance team soon found themselves overwhelmed with spreadsheet crashes, version control issues, GL clean-up, vendor-level mappings, and multi-version forecasting.
She knew that in order to optimize her team's skills and time, she would need to implement FP&A software to eliminate the burden of manual data operations and the constant threat of their Excel models and workflows crashing.
The core operational problem was the inherent complexity in the company’s Excel spreadsheets, which frequently crashed under the weight of it. And implementing NetSuite didn’t eliminate the finance team’s need for Excel, and to make matters worse, that process made working with them even more difficult. Agarwal said, “Even with NetSuite implemented, the entire financial planning and modeling process was very, very manual.” For example, the finance team had to do a lot of work on the data in the GLs for each of their entities in order to work with it in NetSuite. To do that, they first had to download the GL for each entity and use Excel to create a common key between them. Then they had to figure out the mapping on MIS.
Customizing the data at a vendor by vendor, payment by payment level across seven geographies was extremely difficult. The mappings were very, very complex, and Excel just wasn’t cut out to manage those. This and all the other data challenges came to a head right before a board meeting. The Excel file crashed and all the data the finance team had prepared to present to the board was wiped out and would only open in recovery mode.
This is the kind of thing that keeps CFOs and their teams up at night. Afterward, Agarwal and her team were constantly aware of the fragility of their system and the prospect of recurring data loss amid the backdrop of looming board meetings and corrupt files. This only added to the Excel burden. Agarwal said that in response, her team was “starting to do monthly, quarterly forecasts, and then keeping so many versions and having the backup data for each version and then connecting with the payroll and with the headcount—it was just becoming a nightmare.”
This spreadsheet-induced crisis wasn't a NetSuite issue—it was simply that Sirion had grown to the point that using NetSuite with Excel, with all its inherent limitations, had created an unsustainable process riddled with manual workflows.
Excel is known for its flexibility. But, when businesses like Sirion grow in their complexity, they often start bumping (or, in this case, crashing) into its limitations. For Sirion, this not only led to fragile workflows, it also created accountability gaps. Agarwal explained, “Excel gives you only so much flexibility. You can just go and edit stuff on the fly, and you get tempted to type in numbers there. When you have to explain the logic after two years, you don't remember you added 220 there.”
Structuring costs and preparing accurate data that could be confidently presented to the board and investors was always a challenge. This was, in part, because spreadsheets are static in nature. In order to ensure the data is up to date for financial reporting requires a ton of manual effort.
Agarwal said that, when it came to financial reporting, there were a lot of things Excel couldn’t do, such as bifurcating costs into COGS and OpEx or slicing and dicing the data to present it in different ways. “Let's say I wanted to see travel across the company. I couldn't have done it on Excel because, in Excel, my dimensions used to get limited,” she said. Recalling the work involved in getting the data organized to present to the board, Agarwal said, “I had to take the GL maps per the NetSuite data, and then classify them into multiple categories. Being able to figure it out was not that easy.”
Agarwal knew that without an FP&A tool in place, and in the presence of fragile and static Excel spreadsheets, maintaining their financial models, not to mention their credibility with the board and investors, would always be a challenge.
Agarwal decided to evaluate a few FP&A tools. However, she soon realized the adoption risk of the larger FP&A tools. The demos confirmed her doubts. One prospective vendor she contacted refused to build a proof of concept.
“We gave them a use case, and they were like, no. We don't do POCs. I said since the tool appears so complex, with the POC, you know, I will learn more about your tool’s efficiency. Then they said that if they do eventually agree to a POC, it would take a long time. And, I thought, how can they build forecasts and scenarios if they can't do a simple POC within a week?” - Yati Agarwal.
Implementation and ease of use were key criteria for Agarwal because she knew that choosing a complex platform that comes with long onboarding times would further burden her already-stretched team with training and take longer to realize any value. So, she focused her search on finding a platform that had the right mix—an easy-to-use UI and enterprise-level capabilities, without the added headache of implementation specialists and customer support. And after her experience with the vendor refusing to do a POC, finding a service provider that would partner in a way that would feel like an extension of her small finance team also became part of her criteria.
When Alok Goel, Co-founder and CEO/CFO at Drivetrain, reached out to Agarwal, she was already evaluating enterprise FP&A tools. Agarwal and Goel had several professional connections in common, and when she learned that a member of her team had used Drivetrain at his earlier workplace, she decided to explore the platform.
“I asked my colleague if [Drivetrain] was easy to work with, and he said it was very easy. So, the ease of use started giving us comfort, plus knowing Alok indirectly through the common network gave me comfort. I asked Alok if he could build up a model for us as a POC. The very next day they built up that model beautifully.” - Yati Agarwal.
After seeing the POC and how quickly Drivetrain was able to build it, Agarwal knew the company and platform could meet her three core requirements:
With Drivetrain’s native integration for NetSuite, Agarwal’s team was able to easily connect the two platforms to automate data consolidation and validation. This significantly reduced the time required for the monthly close and reporting process by eliminating all the cumbersome manual data operations. With their data reliably flowing in from NetSuite the team was able to view everything in Drivetrain to verify it.
“The moment NetSuite's team closes their monthly bookings, it automatically flows here [into Drivetrain], and the team has to just verify and look for projections. So, it's a verification process, not a creation process anymore.” - Yati Agarwal.
Monthly closures now happen on the accrual planned date—a deadline routinely pushed back two weeks or more due to all the data consolidation and verification challenges when using spreadsheets to do the work.
Today, the first cut of the data is ready for verification by the 10th of each month, and the finance team only has to spend a couple more days on their analysis and reporting. With Drivetrain, the ever-present spreadsheet chaos and month-end fire-fighting was replaced with a predictable cadence built on reliable data.
Drivetrain also enabled Agarwal and her team to replace the rigid, hard-coded formulas in their Excel models with dynamic allocation models that allow for exceptions and overrides on the formulas while ensuring auditability. Agarwal explained, “With Drivetrain, there's more flexibility, and that helps us in planning and in actualization because then we don't have to hard code the formula. We can say 50% of this headcount is going here, 50% is going there, etc. It gives us a good way to override our own formulas. Formulas or concepts are set up for the baseline, and whenever there's exception handling, we are able to manage the exceptions on the surface.”
In addition to providing more flexible, agile modeling, Agarwal’s team was able to answer questions and field requests faster. What used to take two days of manual work now just takes a few clicks.
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In Drivetrain, if I want to slice or dice the data or track something, I can create filters. Now we can do entities, payroll, non-payroll, headcount, you name it. We can pick up any category and put a filter of that across the company, and we can track what it was in the budget, what it was in the forecast, what it was in reality.
For Agarwal, one of Drivetrain’s most valuable contributions, beyond the easy integration with NetSuite and other key business systems and the robust modeling capabilities, was the structural discipline the platform encouraged in terms of her team's thinking and analytical approach.
“Drivetrain pushed us harder and harder to structure our thoughts into data structures and databases, and we pushed ourselves as an FP&A team to think deeper. If we had stayed on Excel, we would have continued to be more and more messy.” - Yati Agarwal.
As the finance team started using Drivetrain, they began to feel more confident about their data. Now, even in the face of pushback, they could leverage Drivetrain to quickly provide reliable data to defend their assumptions.
“I think from a peace of mind perspective, Drivetrain helps us be diligence-ready. Now, if I have to go for my funding round and somebody says, why did you take this much cost here? It is easier for me to download the [data] from Drivetrain. Because of Drivetrain, our own data hygiene has become proper over time. So, I feel more confident that there's a logic behind the numbers.” - Yati Agarwal.
Agarwal witnessed the pay-off firsthand when investors requested historical pipeline data which, before adopting Drivetrain, could have become a major crisis.
“Recently, I was asked to give snapshots of SFDC. We didn’t know if the integration (with Salesforce) was still working. If it didn’t there was no other way to recover snapshots of SFDC…As I'm saying this, I have goosebumps because Drivetrain really came to my rescue. I was able to download two and a half years of snapshots. I had the data I needed and I didn’t have to worry.” - Yati Agarwal.
We are a customer that's been renewing Drivetrain every year, and we are pretty stuck on it. We are not going anywhere. We want to continue on this journey.
CFO at Sirion
Drivetrain has provided Agarwal lasting peace of mind—no more nightmare scenarios with corrupted Excel files or worrying about when her fragile system would fail her again. Now, she’s working with a powerful FP&A platform built by a company that she can trust and partner with on Sirion's continued growth journey.
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