Does this sound familiar?
A fast-growing software company was taking up to three weeks to close their monthly books. Due to the amount of time spent pulling and compiling data from various sources in Excel - they were out of time with reconciling their month-end close.
The Challenge
Our client initially engaged with us to develop a solution for supporting their month-end close process. They had experienced massive growth and were manually combining data from their internal systems, third party credit card processors, and legacy reporting platforms all in Excel. Due to the complexity of the various data silos and the limitations of Excel, the month-end close process required four people working 8 - 10 hours per day for 2 - 3 weeks, just to close the books. By the time they closed the books for a given month, they had to get ready to do it all again.
The Solution
Waterloo Data assigned a light-weight consulting team consisting of two senior consultants with backgrounds in Finance and Data Warehousing. The team quickly developed an understanding of the various source systems in place and the desired reporting and financial reconciliations that needed to be performed for month-end close. Leveraging Microsoft Azure (Microsoft's cloud platform), Waterloo designed and created a data pipeline that automatically pulled and processed data across the various silos and delivered a set of data marts that supported standard operational reporting as well as ad-hoc reporting.
The Results
The first release of the solution saved 1000s of man-hours every month and allowed the client to go from a 3 week close to a 5-day close. All of the transactions across the whole company were now in a centralized data warehouse which provided a solid base to build upon. Subsequent releases of the data warehouse saw the inclusion of data from SalesForce, Google Analytics, and provided better insight for areas such as Customer Service, Fraud Detection, and Revenue Retention. The client now uses the data warehouse to support insight-based decision making on a daily basis.
I Love, Love, Love The Data Warehouse!
Waterloo Data has been a trusted partner of mine for over 5 years. I have hired them to quickly deliver data warehouse and analytics features at multiple companies and they always deliver results that delight my customers and stakeholders. Waterloo excels at high risk/high profile projects and I don't know of anyone with a better track record of delivery.Kristin Runyan SVP Marketing/Product, PayLease
