When Excel Isn’t Enough
When Jacob joined Origin Materials, he had an opportunity few finance leaders get: build the FP&A function from the ground up.
But starting from scratch did not mean starting simple.
Origin had roughly 25 budgets with different owners, complex manufacturing and capital planning needs, workforce planning, and data living across systems including NetSuite, ADP, banks, and its CRM.
One option was to build the process directly in Excel, using macros to consolidate files into a master workbook. Technically, it could work. Practically, Jacob knew the fragility of this process.
“I’m very comfortable building complex models and processes in Excel, but I knew macros could be finicky and break, and I didn’t really want to take that approach.”
Moving away from Excel entirely did not make sense either. Jacob had worked with, and evaluated, planning platforms before, including Pigment and Vena, but considered them restrictive. Origin needed the freedom to manipulate data, adapt to different planning needs, and build workflows around a complex manufacturing business.
Two Birds, One Platform
With Datarails, Jacob could continue building in Excel, giving finance the flexibility it needed without forcing budget owners into an unfamiliar environment. At the same time, Datarails could add structure to those spreadsheets, connect them to live data through Datarails’ FinanceOS, bringing information together automatically.
Origin also had another gap to solve: they had no dedicated data team, with the downside that finance had no obvious path toward building dashboards and giving the business easier access to analysis. Datarails gave Jacob a way to begin building those capabilities.
It was two birds with one stone. With Datarails, we could set up the planning side, but it was also a way for us to start bringing in dashboarding and data analytics when we didn’t have a data team.
Jacob and his two-person team became the primary power users, with 25 people using Datarails for processes including budgets, workforce planning, capital planning, and monthly budget-versus-actual reporting.
Making 25 Budgets Behave
For Jacob, one of the fastest improvements was consolidation.
Rather than gathering individual budgets and forecasts and manually rolling them together, finance could standardize the process and consolidate everything through FinanceOS.
We had a lot of capital projects, and every project manager had their own slightly different forecast template. We standardized that, and then we could easily roll it up and compare across projects.
Jacob estimates that using Datarails for consolidating data alone gave his team 24 hours back each month. Overall, Jacob says, the power of Datarails applied to recurring monthly forecasts, budgeting cycles, and other manual processes sees his team save a month of manual work each year, compared to their legacy processes.
Datarails also helped the team spot gaps between planning data and underlying source systems.
Take Workforce planning. ADP held the official HR and payroll data, while hiring and recruiting plans were managed separately in Excel. The two did not always reconcile.
Bringing that workforce plan into Datarails and incorporating HRIS data directly, visibility was magnified. If a plan did not match what was recorded in ADP, the Origin Materials team knew something needed attention.
But Jacob did not see the biggest win as simply getting hours back or flagging mismatched data. The bigger enhancement using Datarails was transforming how the finance team operates, enabling and transforming its mindset
It reduced a lot of the friction that finance teams tend to struggle with. We’re able to move pretty fast as a lean team because of it.
Flipping the Script on Finance
The impact wasn’t one dramatic report or breakthrough analysis. It was being able to get to answers faster, again and again.
Once recurring reports and planning processes were in place, Jacob’s team simply refreshed information instead of rebuilding it. With the data at their fingertips, finance gets to the analysis sooner and responds more quickly whenever the business needs something.
For a small team supporting a complex business, this approach changes how finance is viewed.
Finance is often seen as the function that slows a process down while everyone waits for the numbers. Jacob wanted Origin’s team to be known for the opposite.
It speeds up your rate of analysis because you have everything at your fingertips. Instead of finance being the function that slows things down. Datarails helped us flip the script and finally become a finance function that speeds things up.
