How Starlet Group achieved strategic acceleration with Drivetrain

The Challenge

As CFO of Starlet Group, Okan Karliova was managing a complex web of entities in the iGaming industry—each with its own Xero instance. Karliova needed a way to make multi-entity consolidation and reporting easier and more reliable, because the company’s leaders and stakeholders were demanding more holistic views on financial performance than a traditional accounting tool like Xero could provide.

Speed wasn't just nice to have. In an industry where market conditions shift weekly and opportunities vanish overnight, it was essential.

Karliova knew that to be competitive, the company would need strategic velocity—the agility and ability to confidently make fast, data-driven business decisions.

How could he deliver enterprise-grade insights at startup speed?

Three obstacles stood in his way: financials that had to be manually stitched together, scenarios that took a full day to run, and a tool that couldn't keep up with the questions he needed to answer.

“Assembly required”

When Karliova joined Starlet Group, the company had built its financial foundation on Xero. While its cloud-based agility served the company well for day-to-day accounting, Karliova found it surprisingly primitive for financial reporting.

The fundamental problem: Xero couldn't consolidate across multiple entities. With three separate Xero instances, Karliova had to manually pull, combine, and reconcile data before he could answer even basic questions about the business as a whole.

For a multi-entity organization, this wasn't a minor inconvenience—it was a critical limitation that added hours to every reporting cycle and made fast, data-driven decisions nearly impossible.

When a day is too long to wait

The real pain point emerged during budget season. While some of the add-on solutions to Xero offer budgeting capabilities, Karliova found that it doesn’t provide advanced forecasting, scenario modeling, or collaboration features.

When leadership wanted to explore different scenarios, the process would consume an entire day. Karliova would have to gather revised inputs and then manually stitch all the data together to calculate downstream impacts across entities. Only then could he measure cash flow outcomes. By the time he was able to deliver answers, the strategic moment had often passed.

It became clear to Karliova that the company needed to move faster because, in the iGaming industry, being right tomorrow wasn't good enough. They needed to be right today.

A tool built for accounting, not agility

Even more frustrating was Xero's fundamental architecture. Xero uses "tracking categories" to allow users to analyze financial data in different dimensions, but it only allows two active tracking categories to be used at the same time.

This was a serious limitation for Karliova because he needed to do more than analyze revenue and expenses. He’d built a sophisticated Excel planning model with multiple dimensions that would allow him to slice and dice the data by entity, product line, geography, and customer segment.

Because Xero couldn't support this kind of multi-dimensional analysis, Karliova was forced to maintain a separate planning model in Excel. Every time inputs changed, he had to manually update both systems and verify they aligned—a time-consuming process that was prone to error.

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The Solution

From limitation to leverage

What Karliova needed was a comprehensive FP&A platform. He initially explored the solution Xero recommended, but it felt more like financial reporting software—great for telling stories about data, not working with it.

So, he turned to AI platforms. He described his consolidation challenges, and the AI recommended two solutions, one of which was Drivetrain. Ultimately, he chose Drivetrain for its advanced planning capabilities, along with the ability to drill down and analyze his data in any number of dimensions.

When the model comes to life

Karliova was able to easily connect Drivetrain with all of Starlet's Xero instances to automate his consolidation of financials across all entities. This was the challenge that he initially set out to solve when he found Drivetrain. However, he soon realized that he’d found much more.

Drivetrain is a powerful FP&A platform, designed from the ground up for strategic financial planning and analysis. By recreating that model on the Drivetrain platform, deep, multi-dimensional modeling not only became possible, but it was also fast and easy, and far more reliable than Excel.

Upon seeing his model come to life in Drivetrain, Karliova knew he didn’t have to worry about whether the results were accurate—a constant concern with spreadsheet-based models. “The beauty is that there’s zero room for error. When something changes, I know it flows all the way through the finances into the cash flow. When I saw that in action, it was fantastic.”

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One platform, one truth

Inspired by Drivetrain’s dashboarding capabilities, Karliova began to explore additional ways to leverage the platform. In addition to integrating Xero and Microsoft SharePoint, he had been considering using Microsoft Power BI for analytics and data visualization. But when he saw how easy it is to build detailed, interactive dashboards in Drivetrain, he thought, “Why load all this [data] manually into Power BI when I can just integrate?”

Karliova was beginning to see the true depth of Drivetrain. He instinctively knew that with more than 800 native integrations, creating a single source of truth for all the company’s data would not only be easy but also a solid strategic move. So, he scrapped the idea of using Power BI and once he gets his data warehouse set up, will instead integrate Drivetrain directly with all the systems that hold the data he needs to track the company’s operational KPIs alongside its financial KPIs.

A hands-on partnership

Karliova really appreciated the support he received during implementation, "At a start-up, I'm basically the financial analyst, FP&A manager, and CFO at the same time. So, I don't have a large team in place at the moment. I had to do everything myself, which is why we chose [Drivetrain's] ‘white glove’ approach."

What made this implementation unique was the partnership between Karliova and the onboarding team. Most customers are happy to let Drivetrain’s onboarding team handle everything. However, driven by both an engineering mindset and a deep interest in FP&A, he wanted to be directly involved in the implementation work. This wasn’t because he had to. He just wanted to understand how Drivetrain worked at a deeper level.

When asked about this, Karliova shrugged his shoulders and said with a smile, "Knowing myself, I can't hold myself back. So I stepped in. It was a great collaboration." He added that working with the onboarding team has been one of his favorite parts of Starlet's engagement with Drivetrain. During the implementation phase, whatever he couldn't do himself, he said his customer success manager (CSM), Elise, was always there to help.

So, Karliova leaned in, actively collaborating with Drivetrain to shape the platform for Starlet Group's unique needs. What emerged was more than vendor support—it was a hands-on partnership invested in Starlet Group's success.

Impact

Key Results

The power of Drivetrain became clear one morning during budget planning. At 9 am, Karliova received revised marketing inputs from the CMO during a live session with Starlet Group’s leadership.

Before, this would have meant starting over—gathering inputs from multiple teams, integrating data, calculating downstream impacts, and measuring cash flow outcomes. A full day's work, at minimum. And he would have had to follow up with his leadership with new numbers once that was done.

Instead, Karliova just opened Drivetrain and updated the KPI. Within one minute—not one day—they saw the complete cascading impact across all entities, through the P&L, into cash flow projections.

"I copied one KPI that changed and immediately saw how much cash it contributed," Karliova said. No second-guessing whether calculations were correct. No worrying about broken formulas or missing entities. He said, "Everything just flowed automatically."

He recalled giving the leaders a moment or two to take it in. Then the CMO said, “We are a light year ahead of our competitors.” That was a big moment for Karliova, “We're just starting up in this industry, and he said he doesn't know of a single player that has an advanced model like this—one they can use to interactively plan and report.”

“That’s the dynamism of Drivetrain,” said Karliova.

Solving data discrepancies in minutes, not hours

What started as a way to solve the challenges of multi-entity consolidation quickly became a new competitive advantage—strategic velocity.

For Karliova, the need for speed wasn't just about running scenarios faster—it was about reconciling them faster too. When budget scenarios didn't match expectations, Karliova used Drivetrain's version comparison feature to instantly see what changed between iterations.

What used to require hours of cell-by-cell investigation in Excel now took minutes. "With scenario comparison reports, I could immediately see where the difference was coming from and which lines were impacted," Karliova explained. Now, he is able to catch any errors during planning before they impact business decisions.

Enterprise-grade FP&A with a team of one

Managing multi-entity modeling complexity, scenario iterations, and version tracking typically demands dedicated FP&A headcount. At Starlet, Karliova now handles it single-handedly.

"I thought I needed an FP&A team member. I no longer do. Really, it's as practical as that," he said.

With the manual data work automated, he's shifted his focus to what matters most—analysis and delivering strategic insights to leadership. Drivetrain has become a force multiplier, enabling one CFO to deliver enterprise-level FP&A.

From consolidation to collaboration

Inspired by Drivetrain’s dashboarding capabilities, Karliova is digging into building interactive dashboards with waterfall charts and trend analysis. He’s now completely transitioned from sharing financials in Excel to presenting information-rich visual dashboards with his leadership and stakeholders.

“The waterfall functionality is perfect, by the way—a must-have for finance people.”

In addition to making the financials easier to understand and act on, building dashboards and giving them on-demand access through Drivetrain has helped him reclaim even more time—strategic time previously spent generating reports.

With the role-based access controls Drivetrain provides, he can share the right information with the right people, sending them directly to Drivetrain when they have questions. 

No more scrambling to put together ad hoc reports. When company leaders need information, they log into Drivetrain to get it. Karliova said, “I’ve built so many beautiful dashboards already,” noting that he saves time with each one he builds. He said when they ask him for data, all he has to do is tell them to just go to Drivetrain. “I love telling them that,” he said.  

Looking ahead, Karliova plans to share Drivetrain with the operational teams, allowing them to provide input directly rather than funneling everything through finance. When he does, the platform will provide an even stronger foundation for collaborative, data-driven decision-making across the entire company.

For Korliova, the journey with Drivetrain started with a simple need: consolidating multiple Xero instances. However, it wasn’t long before he discovered and started leveraging the platform’s capabilities to unlock a key competitive advantage—the strategic velocity needed to propel Starlet Group to the leading edge of the fast-moving iGaming industry.