The only financial model template you'll ever need—just plug in your actuals to see projections
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Snapshot of Whatfix
Integrations
Key Challenges Faced
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Connecting ERP & CRM data
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Manual month-end consolidation
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Limited time for forward-looking analysis
Whatfix’s small finance team of five people faced a significant challenge dealing with data silos. For instance, preparing a sales forecast involved pulling numbers from two different systems—Salesforce for pipeline details and marrying that with transactional data from NetSuite.
They also had to follow up with multiple stakeholders for their budget plans to create variance reports. And with every budget owner preparing their budgets in Excel, it resulted in multiple emails and version control issues.
“Even if we standardized a spreadsheet template, department heads would input their budget numbers and team costs, and send us different Excel versions of that. It was difficult to track, and sometimes they would change the assumptions or formulas. It caused a lot of frustration,” says Amit Sharma, who has been part of Whatfix’s mercurial growth journey since joining the company in January 2018. As the Head of Finance, Amit plays a key role in their budgeting, forecasting and overall business planning efforts at the corporate level. Additionally, for Whatfix’s finance team, it meant tedious, manual consolidations to roll up the budgets across territories, market segments, and other business cuts across these disjointed spreadsheets.
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It was a painstaking process to provide the management with a complete and accurate financial view of the business. We spent so much time validating numbers, updating them constantly and repeating the process every quarter.
Whatfix needed one source of truth for all financial and business information since cutting and pasting data from multiple systems affected accuracy, productivity, and took time away from forward-looking analysis.
Layering Whatfix’s financial data from Oracle NetSuite over their revenue metrics from Salesforce—thanks to Drivetrain’s data connectors—has made analysis faster and helped the Whatfix executive management to make more confident and informed decisions. With Drivetrain acting as the single, central source of truth, Whatfix’s metrics—be it sales metrics such as retention rate, churn, average deal size, etc. to financial and operational metrics such as MRR, quick ratio, etc.—are consistent across their dataset.
With automated consolidation and centralization of actuals, Whatfix eliminated days of manual work to create variance reports as it is available in real-time. “We’ve been able to go deeper into our data much faster than before and generate those insights,” says Atharv. Drivetrain also provided an easy way to make accurate reporting accessible to the entire organization.
We didn’t have to wrestle with spreadsheets anymore,” says Abhishek. “With a single source of truth and a familiar Excel-like interface, Drivetrain instantly clicked with department heads. They didn’t need to rely on us (finance team) for budgets or variance reports which were completely automated now. It empowered everyone across the organization to be more autonomous and increased accountability.
By having a single platform to coordinate planning, budgeting and reporting, stakeholders could collaborate with cross-functional teams to build detailed and accurate plans and budgets that were aligned and, more importantly, current as they quickly scaled. This provided a way for Whatfix’s finance team to have meaningful discussions with non-finance teams around performance as well as future strategy, opportunities and investment areas, driving better accountability.
We initially rolled out Drivetrain to just the RevOps team but now have extended Drivetrain to more departments, including sales, customer success, HR, and marketing. Now, everyone always has the data they need to make the right decisions.
Senior Director, Finance
Manually building out financial models in Excel, constantly updating them and sharing reports on time with stakeholders was hard for Whatfix’s finance team of just five people. But, with Drivetrain, which comes with automatic consolidations, and seamless integrations to their source systems, they have complete visibility of financial and business metrics, and it has saved them several days of time and effort from not having to manipulate spreadsheets for monthly reporting.
As Whatfix focuses on delivering best-in-class digital adoption software, Drivetrain has helped them scale up faster and more predictably.
