CloudPay is a fast-growing online payroll company that provides a unified platform for global employee pay processes at over 1,500 multinational companies, including Intuit and S&P Global.
The pay processes include payroll, payments, and on-demand pay, and the CloudPay platform is available in over 130 countries.
Headquartered in England, CloudPay has offices in about a dozen countries and recently announced a partnership with Visa to reduce payroll payment cycles from two or three days to a few seconds.
CloudPay uses Datarails to consolidate different types of data and reduce time spent on budgeting and reporting. The improved accuracy and visibility have increased confidence in the numbers and the willingness to invest in growth.
The implementation was extremely efficient as you start to build out real-life business processes from the outset, which means you get a return on investment from Day 1.
Craig MorrowHead of FP&A
The problem: reporting and budgeting took too long and were very manual
Before using Datarails, reporting and budgeting processes were time-consuming at CloudPay, and the management and board lacked visibility and confidence in the financials.
That’s why when Craig Morrow became head of FP&A at CloudPay, his top priority was to upgrade the finance team’s technology as soon as possible.
The structure of the company was changing rapidly, and offline financial reporting methods just couldn’t keep up. There was no easy way to keep track of CloudPay’s financial data, and no time to compare budgets to actuals or create forecasts. Consolidating data inputs from department heads spanning different time zones and foreign currencies was a painfully long process that preceded each financial reporting and budgeting period.
The solution: bring together different types of data fast, for “ROI from Day 1”
Craig needed a solution that could bring together different types of data to streamline each financial process – and he needed it fast.
“It came down to time and how quickly we could get users on board and signed in,” he said. “We had about six weeks to make a decision, start implementing the solution, and then start to carry out the budget as well.”
Datarails met those needs and had the added benefit of enabling the finance team to continue using Excel.
“I compared other solutions too, but I didn’t really want to look at them anyway because most of them were all about replacing Excel instead of enhancing Excel,” said Craig. “It’s almost impossible to replace Excel in an organization such as CloudPay. The beauty of Datarails is that when I was training our budget holders on the system, everything looked familiar to them because they’re used to using Excel.”
Datarails’ automated data consolidation makes it easy for Morrow to present the financials for each department in a single, simple view – without the manual effort that such consolidation would normally require.
“The beauty of Datarails in terms of consolidation is we were able to pull in various data feeds from different systems and present them in one view within Excel,” Craig said.
The ease of use also made it easy for the company to adopt Datarails – and provided ROI from Day 1.
“The functionality within the solution is exactly what any FP&A professional should be looking for in a solution,” said Craig. “The implementation was extremely efficient as you start to build out real-life business processes from the outset, which means you get a return on investment from Day 1.”
Having all the financial and operational information in one place also reduces the risk of inaccurate reporting, both by exposing discrepancies in data and by providing the information necessary to account for them.
Before using Datarails, the finance team had to attempt to sort out such discrepancies by asking the department heads, and they did not necessarily have the data needed to close the gaps. Now, with a click of a button, the finance or operations team can easily drill down into the consolidated data to get the information needed.
The beauty of Datarails in terms of consolidation is we were able to pull in various data feeds from different systems and present them in one view within Excel.
Reducing Time Spent on Budgeting and Reporting by 40%
Before Datarails, CloudPay struggled to stay in control over the distribution of budget files. There were many different versions and different formats, often riddled with errors. Any changes that Morrow had to address, such as resolving an error or updating a number, needed to be done manually on over a dozen spreadsheets, which were then to be manually shared with each department head.
“The shareability of the data was very, very manual. That’s one of the biggest pain points I recall,” said Craig. “The previous years’ budget seasons are something not to be remembered. Similar horror stories as every other business based on Excel. It was really difficult to find any sort of information quickly.”
Datarails has put an end to this problem. Now CloudPay’s budget is managed on one Excel spreadsheet, which is connected online to the budget files used by each department head – so the finance team can make a change once, and it will automatically update all related files. And vice versa: Morrow will see any updated financial numbers from the department heads as his spreadsheet updates automatically.
Datarails tracks every change and makes previous versions easily accessible, without the need to manually make changes to file names and keep previous versions saved to a local drive.
Automating that manual work has reduced the time it takes CloudPay to complete its budgeting and month-end reporting processes by 40 percent.
“My experience with Datarails has been first-class,” said Craig. “I have assisted with a seamless integration for budgeting purposes and have now rolled out the solution for month-end reporting. In both scenarios, I have been able to reduce the time required for completion by around 40%.”
When I was training our budget holders on the system, everything looked familiar to them because they’re used to using Excel.
Using Live Dashboards to Save Time and Improve Stakeholder Engagement
Getting stakeholders engaged in the budget process poses a challenge for many finance teams. Morrow uses Datarails interactive dashboards as a creative solution to get the department heads and management on board.
“Within Datarails, dashboards were just a natural extension of the solution. I found them very intuitive and very easy to build,” said Craig.
The dashboards he shared got good feedback from the department heads.
“When we shared those dashboards with the budget holders, they were well-received,” he said. “The fact that you can essentially just automate and have a new month’s worth of data feeding into the solution, and not really worry about recreating dashboards each month made it a seamless transition.”
Using the Datarails permission settings, Craig was able to keep financial information secure without doing the additional work of creating separate graphs for stakeholders with different permission levels.
“I only needed to build one dashboard and share that with the budget holders, and based on their permission sets they would only see their own data, for their own budget, that they were concerned with, which was really good for security and people not looking at each other’s budgets. It was good for internal politics. And at the end of the day, they look pretty cool.”
Craig explained how, thanks to the Datarails visualization tool, each department head is able to tell their story through the data and answer questions about how they got to their numbers.
“Each month we had a new month’s worth of data,” which is automatically fed into these personalized dashboards and PowerPoints, he said. “We actually provided each budget holder with, essentially, an executive summary of their budget output. We had a series of budget review meetings, and each budget holder had to stand up and present their own budget.”
The seamless integration among Datarails dashboards, Excel, and PowerPoint saves Craig significant time preparing the various files the organization depends on for budget season. From updating data to file collection management to delivering presentations to the board: It’s all automated.
“It was really cool to connect the budget output dashboard to a template in PowerPoint, which just pulls in the headcount salary data from each department,” said Craig. “That was presented to our leadership team and to the board. Because I can add filters and permission settings for each department, I only had to create the PowerPoint once.”
Within Datarails, dashboards were just a natural extension of the solution. I found them very intuitive and very easy to build.
The impact: more visibility leads to greater confidence in the numbers and investment in company growth
The increased accuracy, reliability, and granularity of the data have given the CloudPay board far greater confidence in the numbers than it had before the company started using Datarails. And that made it possible to invest in the company’s growth, through board approval of a $2 million to develop a better payroll engine.
Beyond board confidence, increased visibility also means stakeholders within the company can now instantly access visualizations of the entire company’s data at a glance. Being able to apply different filters and views to dashboards means there is always one source of truth.
“Because there was visibility, everyone understood what was happening a lot more,” said Craig. “There was a lot of clarity on exactly what the numbers were telling us. The board said, ‘We don’t mind investing more this year.”
Datarails’ data consolidation and real-time drilldown capabilities helped the board see that CloudPay had a much firmer grasp on the financials than before.
“Templates that compared actuals to budget to previous years at the click of a button enabled me to very quickly answer any questions or even provide the analysis, data, explanation, and story behind the numbers,” said Craig. “Because there was such visibility into the overall P&L and a lot more granularity than we ever had, there were new projects and investments that were then able to be included in the overall budget.”
