Whatfix makes informed growth decisions with automated financial reporting in Drivetrain

Data silos made tracking budget vs. actuals manual, tedious & error-prone for Whatfix

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.

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.

How Drivetrain Helped

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.

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.