Elevating Financial & Operational Reporting
The Situation
A $30B sponsor recently acquired a leading strategic communications firm. The Company wanted to automate its periodic financial & operational reporting function, because the current process required tedious manual processes. In addition, the Company’s existing customer relationship management (CRM) platform proved inadequate by failing to automatically identify and classify clients based on the types of revenue generated. Accordion was engaged to survey, automate, and elevate the level of reporting in terms of accuracy, scope, and scalability.
Services
Actionable Business Analytics
Finance Function Automation
Stakeholder Reporting & Strategic KPI Enhancement
The Execution
- Partnered with the Finance & Accounting team to review and clean data generated by the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system
- Rationalized and enhanced KPIs
- Leveraged the Company’s existing technology infrastructure by building a business intelligence tool designed to seamlessly upload data from the ERP system and provide real-time business analytics
- Integrated data across actual, budgeted, and forecast P&L, headcount & employee time, and billing to generate variance analysis and insights
- Developed and implemented complex (but behind-the-scenes) computing logic that assigned clients to different revenue categories based on the timeframe selected and the types of revenue generated
- Stood-up a secure subscription model with automated daily refreshes that allowed managers and executives to receive customized reports relating to their specific clients and departments
The Results
Accordion provided the Company with a critical business intelligence tool to analyze P&L, HR, and billing metrics with customized access and views depending on the audience. The team also implemented behind-the-scenes complex logic that automated the process of identifying clients based on revenue. This work provided trending insights that were previously unavailable to Management. Executives and Department Managers can now track KPIs against budget & forecast metrics with one source of underlying data. Tedious processes, human error, and scalability constraints are no longer an issue with this automated, flexible tool in place. Ultimately, the company has greater resources available to add value through actionable insights.