How Workbuzz uses Mosaic and Maxio to respond to CEO’s questions in seconds
“Our ability to do what-if analysis live in executive meetings has opened up so many new conversations. Now we can ask questions like ‘what would the model look like if we raised or lowered our ARR target’ or ‘what’s the cash impact if we do X instead of Y?’…and I instantly have those answers at my fingertips. It has changed everything.”
Vicky Magill
Finance Director, Workbuzz
About Workbuzz
WorkBuzz is HR’s secret weapon. It helps companies gather real-time feedback from their people, track employee wellbeing, and make more informed data-driven people decisions.
WorkBuzz offers a simple, flexible, actionable way to engage your everyday heroes—your employees. Designed for HR leaders with deskless, hybrid, and remote workforces, WorkBuzz lets you ask the right questions at the right time with traditional annual or regular pulse surveys.
The Challenge
Stuck in the mud—the challenge before Mosaic and Maxio
Vicky’s tenure as a finance leader at a burgeoning tech company was fraught with the challenges of manual processes. Forecasting, board reporting, and scenario analysis were mired in spreadsheets as was the manual nature of tracking ARR, revenue recognition, and customer billings. The labor- intensive, error-prone nature of these tasks took Vicky and her team dozens of hours each week. This was compounded by an excel-based model that was inherited from predecessors and never quite felt like their own, something far too many finance professionals have to endure. This made financial planning and operations an onerous task.
For example, Vicky used spreadsheets to calculate and track ARR, billings, and revenue recognition. But the data almost instantly became stale, the formulas were complicated and prone to breaking, and ultimately made the team question the reliability of one of their most important metrics.
When it came to preparing for the board meeting—always a stressful and high-stakes exercise— Vicky spent hours pulling all the information together and checking it was correct, meaning there was little time left to develop any extra insight beyond the standard charts. Plus, the visual aesthetics of the final output were fairly basic.
The inefficiency reached its peak in meetings with the CEO for what-if scenario analyses, where manipulating variables for strategic decisions—such as ‘how many AEs do we need to hire to hit this ARR goal?’—led to multiple live spreadsheet versions, confusion on final numbers, and lack of clarity on next steps.
“It’s never fun leaving a meeting and spending the next hour trying to pull elements of five different excel scenarios into another ‘final’ scenario. Going back and forth trying out different variables meant it was easy to lose track of what we had actually agreed upon.”
Finally the breaking point came during a quarterly reforecasting exercise when the balance sheet refused to balance and Vicky couldn’t figure out why (after many hours of investigation), forcing her to go back to an old version where it did balance and doing the forecasting again from scratch.
Vicky was determined to find new tools that could eliminate the manual headaches and inefficiencies and enable the team to respond swiftly to business demands with reliable and actionable insights.
The Solution
Choosing Maxio and Mosaic
After evaluating numerous tools, Vicky and her team chose Maxio for its revolutionary approach to billings and revenue recognition. And they chose Mosaic for its intuitive BI reporting tools, impressive forecasting capabilities, and robust data integrations.
Vicky and her team are using Maxio to manage billings and collections, revenue recognition, and the single source of truth for ARR. The integration with HubSpot ensures that contracted ARR data is accurate and easily accessible, and then Maxio does the heavy lifting of calculating ARR and revenue recognition schedules across time to figure out when customers need to be invoiced. It allows them to leave their manual spreadsheet for tracking behind.
“Maxio has revolutionized how we do everything. Before Maxio, we managed everything in spreadsheets—when to invoice customers, how to track deferred revenue based on billing schedules, and when to recognize revenue. Now with Maxio, everything is so smooth, so easy. I’ve forgotten what life was like before Maxio.”
Workbuzz uses Mosaic as their trusted source of truth for board reporting and real-time analytics, handling everything from ARR, NRR, logo retention, CAC by marketing channel, ACV, Pipeline, Aged AR Receivables, and more. And then surfacing this information in beautiful, board-ready dashboards and reports.
“The board LOVES our presentations out of Mosaic. Our CFO has described our board pack as the best he has seen and a blueprint for how to present KPIs to investors.”
They also use Mosaic to build financial forecasts with ease and accuracy, and run what-if scenario analyses on the fly whenever they get tricky questions from the business. Mosaic’s headcount and income statement modeling tools, combined with direct integrations to both their accounting and HRIS systems, give Vicky and her team real-time OPEX spend data, headcount rosters, and salary updates, and the ability to quickly analyze the financial impacts of dialing headcount up and down based on different strategies and goals.
“Headcount planning in Mosaic is a dream!”
Two peas in a pod—Mosaic and Maxio
Mosaic and Maxio have proved to be perfect complements. Maxio handles the specifics of billings, revenue recognition, and ARR calculations, while Mosaic takes these inputs to further refine financial planning, reporting, and analysis.
For example, through an automated integration, Mosaic takes the ARR data from Maxio and uses it to forecast things like billings renewals, net revenue retention, and headcount needs.
The synergy also enables users to pair trusted ARR and related revenue metrics from Maxio with supplemental financial and operational metrics in Mosaic to round out other mission-critical FP&A workflows like data visualizations and financial statement reporting for executives and board members.
Together, they provide a comprehensive suite of tools for the modern strategic finance team.
The Impact
A bright new future
The implementation of Mosaic and Maxio has revolutionized Workbuzz’s finance operations. The board presentations, now powered by Mosaic, have been highly praised by both the board and the CEO. The ability to conduct what-if analysis live in executive meetings has completely changed the conversation around strategic issues and decisions, providing instant answers and fostering data-driven decision-making.
“Our ability to do what-if analysis live in executive meetings has opened up so many new conversations. Now we can ask questions like ‘what would the model look like if we raised or lowered our ARR target’, or ‘what’s the cash impact if we do X instead of Y?’, or ‘is the pipeline build strong enough to hit next quarter’s targets?’…and I instantly have those answers at my fingertips. It has changed everything.”
And perhaps the biggest testament to Workbuzz’s success is how it has enabled Vicky and her team to demonstrate what a world-class finance team can do when liberated from archaic and inefficient tools. And how it can turn finance from a reactive function barely keeping up to a strategic powerhouse that drives the future direction and success of the business.
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