United Electric is an electric distribution company serving more than 40,000 electric and fiber customers across rural communities in Missouri and Iowa. With a roughly $500 million operation and two fast-growing business lines, CFO Zach Morgan leads a seven-person finance and data team focused on bringing clarity, accuracy, and speed to reporting and planning.
Drowning in Data, Limited by Excel
When Zach joined United Electric in 2016, he found a reporting environment that couldn’t keep pace with the company’s growth. Most analysis lived in Excel, and the team was essentially maintaining a manual, error-prone database for both the electric and fiber businesses.
“We were pretty much building a manual Excel database. There were typo issues, accuracy issues, and a lot of manual work.”
Their large and complex datasets pushed Excel to its limits. Each data pull required rebuilding formulas, restructuring tabs, and fixing broken logic. Department budgeting was especially difficult, assigning codes across such a large operation was overwhelming and a true budget-to-actual view was not realistic.
“It was really hard for us to do department budgets before Datarails. Even if we got things assigned, the inconsistencies meant it was hard to get a true budget-to-actual number.”
United Electric tried other platforms, including Microsoft Power BI, but they lacked the flexibility and hands-on guidance the team needed. Manual work increased, insights lagged, and the risk of errors kept growing.
The team needed a system that could handle scale, stay flexible, and give finance full control.
Structure, Speed, and Scale
What stood out to Zach about Datarails was the mix of flexible dashboards, a data engine built for large volumes, and seamless Excel integration. For the first time, finance could own the structure, the workflows, and the outputs without relying on IT.
To me, Datarails is like a data platform for finance professionals. It lets accounting and finance control the information that goes in and out.
Zach MorganCFO
The impact was immediate. Month-end and board reporting, previously done manually every cycle, now update automatically from a single source of truth. Statements, board materials, and financial packages refresh in seconds.
The formulas and dynamic ranges are some of the most powerful features. We change five or six cells, and all our monthly reports update in an instant.
As reporting needs expanded, Datarails scaled alongside them, with new data, new users, and new reports slotting in without rework. Instead of tracking customer activity at a high level, they now analyze customer segments, connect and disconnect trends, and package movement, giving leadership a sharper view of performance from multiple angles.
Datarails also made true department-level budgeting possible for the first time – structured, consistent, fast, and easy to maintain.
We put together 22 different department budgets over the course of a single day. Now everybody can see exactly where they stand, quickly and accurately.
One Insight Saved Us $2 Million a Year
One of the clearest examples of Datarails’ impact came from a simple pie chart built ahead of a team meeting. Zach’s team broke down vendor spend by income-statement line. When the CEO reviewed it, one vendor dominated an expense line so heavily that it looked like an error.
It was not. A deeper look revealed a contractor charging overtime rates along with a steep inflation clause buried in the contract. United Electric renegotiated, switched vendors, and the savings were immediate.
Datarails gave us visibility we’d never had before. One insight alone saved us about $2 million a year.
Major improvements were seen across accuracy, alignment, and time savings. Instead of multiple customer counts and conflicting datasets, everything now runs through one trusted source.
Processes that once took me months and months will now take just a few days. That seven-month black hole of budgets, audits, and regulatory packages will drop to about one, and I get that time back to focus on more strategic work.
Finance at the Forefront
For Zach, Datarails is part of a broader shift toward modernizing finance, using Datarails AI to produce insights reports to deepen analysis, speed up forecasting, and eliminate more manual work.
Finance and accounting are usually the last to get the cool tools. Not anymore. Datarails feels like a data platform built for us, and it helps democratize data across the organization.
Zach MorganCFO
