Overview

To reconcile key financial and operational data between a SaaS firm’s ERP, HCM, CRM, and FP&A systems, CrossCountry Consulting’s FP&A transformation experts redesigned the firm’s process and technology architecture. By developing and automating new processes for headcount, annual recurring revenue, and enterprise planning, the team generated significant time and labor savings in the firm’s FP&A function.

 

Expertise delivered

  • Accounting workflow automation
  • Long-term financial modeling
  • Driver-based planning model
  • Flexible forecasting and planning processes
  • Transformation project charters
  • Future-state visioning and recommendations

Challenge 

A leading governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) SaaS company was stuck reconciling data between several systems, including Oracle, NetSuite, Salesforce, OneStream, and Greenhouse. And with a continuous need to adjust reporting data, the FP&A function was overwhelmed by sub-optimal technology-process integrations.  

Updating data was manual, and employees relied too heavily on Excel. These actions created data inaccuracies and meant that users couldn’t meaningfully drill into data sets or show real results to the business. Compounding matters further, the company wasn’t set up for scalable growth, as inputs from key functional leaders weren’t sought or factored into forecasting. As a result, there was no way to perform a comparative analysis across the business or to truly harness cross-functional business drivers. 

How We Helped 

CrossCountry Consulting’s FP&A Transformation experts took a multidisciplinary approach to solving the various upstream and downstream financial, operational, and technology challenges. This included a comprehensive assessment of the company’s current-state FP&A function through the lens of people, process, systems, and data. 

As part of the transformation, the team: 

  • Developed future-state planning and forecasting processes for headcount and annual recurring revenue (ARR). 
  • Redesigned the headcount process by recommending an automated model and leveraging existing systems to calculate headcount values and pro forma synergies. 
  • Produced a future-ready implementation roadmap that detailed enhancements required to achieve the desired target state. 
  • Created project charters for each initiative, which defined critical priority areas that would drive transformation success and documented dependencies, levels of efforts, and proposed timelines. 
  • Presented conceptual use of future-state OneStream platform, indicating the process enhancements and integrations to source systems that OneStream would provide solutions for.  
  • Improved turnaround time for producing ARR rollforwards by 60% and added more insight into variance analysis. 
  • Created a Forecast-to-Forecast variance model that compared Renewal Pools vs Prior Forecast by Account. 
  • Drilled into topline processes and recorded step-by-step user guides to update each process. 

Throughout the project, the team provided hands-on support to the company’s FP&A stakeholders to create long-term financial modeling solutions and prepare the company to transition onto a new financial planning tool.     

Results 

The company’s FP&A team began realizing material benefits rapidly. Near-term improvements to reports and workbooks within the ARR workstream reduced manual work effort by 1-2 business days. Parallel to the deployment of these improvements, long-term solutions for the ARR workstream also went into effect. Manual ARR tasks were automated, shortening the ARR reporting lifecycle by 4-5 business days per month. 

The company is now aligned to a driver-based model for headcount planning across dimensions, which will allow business leads to provide necessary inputs at a granular level for the FP&A team to use during forecasting and planning cycles. This forward-looking approach empowers FP&A to drive value across the enterprise and influence strategic corporate decision-making in ways previously impossible. 

With CrossCountry contributing ongoing forecasting, modeling, and automation support, the company is positioned for significant scalability and flexible financial planning far into the future.