Enhancing the Finance Function and Updating Budget Processes
The Situation
A leading growth equity fund had recently acquired a rapidly growing remote network monitoring and infrastructure management business that was in the process of being split into two separate entities (SaaS and VAR businesses). Historically, the company’s budget had faced issues with timeliness, accuracy, and the granularity of the build-up. Additionally, there was limited visibility into the key drivers of profitability. Furthermore, core finance and accounting processes were manual and needed to be documented, assessed and enhanced as part of the organizational development roadmap. The CFO brought on Accordion to help develop a new budget, improve visibility, and enhance finance and accounting operations and processes.
Services
Budgeting & Forecasting Process Improvement
ERP/Financial Systems Assessment
Stakeholder Reporting & Strategic KPI Enhancement
The Execution
Accordion drove rapid implementation of a new budget process and model, which the CFO used to validate, run sensitivity analyses and present a revised budget to the Board of Directors.
- Conducted management interviews in order to develop key budget revenue and expense assumptions.
- Gathered and analyzed historical data from disparate systems in order to further validate department level assumptions.
- Re-built the foundation of the company’s budget model and developed a number of supporting schedules to provide more granular detail for key business drivers.
- Created a detailed build-up of contract base (SaaS) and backlog (VAR projects) to assess and forecast revenue and cash profile.
- Prepared board material and supported ad-hoc analyses such as cash reconciliation, 13-week cash flow modeling and scenario analysis for R&D investments.
We also assessed and developed a roadmap for a new ERP system implementation that would enhance manual accounting, closing, consolidation, and other financial management processes, and supported the ERP vendor selection process.
The Results
The Senior Management team realized meaningful benefits from Accordion’s work including a well-refined, granular, and validated budget used for Board approval. Additionally, with the support on ERP implementation, core accounting and financial management processes were automated.