The Challenge
Management reporting was being prepared manually using a combination of complex Excel files and PowerPoint decks. Forecast and budgeting also existed in an Excel-only process, which made it difficult to coordinate and consolidate.
Finally, Actual and Planning data did not coexist in the same system. Variance analysis required exporting and conforming the disparate sources manually in Excel.
The Solution
The company turned to Eliassen Group to implement OneStream to provide data integration, automation, and management of the close and reporting processes. We also included direct integrations with NetSuite and Salesforce to pull in actual data to support variance analysis, and we created allocations and calculations in the OneStream application to replace the complex Excel processes.
This planning process was turned into a workflow that allowed integration with the existing distributed Excel templates and seeding as needed from actual and prior versions of the plan.
