Moving to Agile Planning

The Challenge

Staying Happy While Budgeting in Spreadsheets

Performance minded leaders like the team at HappyCo understand the importance of building and tracking a budget. A budget helps leadership take a practical and pragmatic approach to goal setting while measuring financial progress against business milestones.

A good budgeting process looks forward more than backward, and helps the team avoid pitfalls by quickly adapting to stay on track. Being proactive and leveraging real-time data is key to ensuring the outcomes a good budget aims to predict. Tight collaboration with business leaders is critical to staying ahead of dynamic business conditions.

But multi-currency, departmental budgeting and forecasting in spreadsheets is backwards-looking and extremely time consuming. It’s difficult to explain all the assumptions that go into every cell and makes collaboration with business leaders confusing.

Before Mosaic, the HappyCo team would spend days consolidating data from multiple ERPs in several currencies, then comparing it to their forecast (BvA). Due to the complexity of the business, by the time they would close the month and publish reports, they were only left with a small window of time to update the budget before starting the close process all over again. Sound familiar?

This narrow window left little time for budget reforecasting—a necessary part of intelligently reviewing performance and allocating resources for any company.

The Solution

A Real-Time, Collaborative Budgeting Platform

The team was looking for ways to optimize and run faster BvA cycles while gaining insights that would help the company make smarter decisions for the road ahead.

To meet the growing demand for their services, HappyCo aimed to accelerate their BvA process by choosing Mosaic as their strategic finance platform.

With Mosaic in place, HappyCo was able to unify its multi-step financial month-end close process inside one platform. Data from their ERP, CRM, HR, and billing systems now flow straight into a central hub that also houses their budget and plan. The entire team has easy access, preventing unwanted delays from hand-offs or translations.

Additionally, expense and revenue forecast variances are available in real-time through a budget tracking canvas so the team can quickly pull insights and drill down into the data on the spot. All critical information is available on-demand so reports and insights could be shared quickly and accurately with key stakeholders.

With much of the heavy lifting out of the way, the team is able to focus on bigger variables such as the impact of growing headcount. Best of all, they could easily model the impact of new expenses or revenue in real-time and provide leaders with a POV to help drive better decision-making.

The Impact

Aligned, Agile and Happy Teams

Mosaic was able to simplify complex and tedious financial consolidation and analysis enabling HappyCo to prepare budget vs. actuals in seconds. The increased time savings have enabled a different kind of budgeting for HappyCo—a more dynamic and agile version where they can provide the strategic advice their company needs today, not next week.