With seven acquisitions in the past 3.5 years alone, Guesty’s financial structure has grown increasingly complex. Barry Lin, Director of FP&A at Guesty, explains that managing many global entities, with numerous subsidiaries, and multiple business units required a more robust solution for their budgeting and forecasting needs.
Navigating Financial Complexities in a Fast-Growing Company
Barry explains, “Our budget is like a matrix of departments and business units.”
The FP&A team was overwhelmed with the time-consuming task of consolidating data across multiple systems. “We relied on a gigantic Google Sheet to manage our finances, which required manual updates and calculations. It was a lot of manual work and was very difficult.”
Manually preparing these reports with the calculations and copy-pasting from their ERP NetSuite into Google Sheets took the finance team up to two days of work every month.
The need for a user-friendly, modern, self-use, affordable solution that works with Excel became evident.
Datarails’ Budgeting & Forecasting is a Perfect Fit for the FP&A Team
Barry found the perfect fit with Datarails: “You stay in the Excel world, and the onboarding is simple.”
The flexibility of Datarails allowed Guesty to seamlessly integrate its existing systems and automate its budgeting and forecasting processes.
“I’ve been able to build the entire infrastructure for next year’s budget on my own, which is amazing. I don’t need any external consultants.”
Key Benefits: Automation, Visualization, and Time Savings
Automation and Time Savings
One of the most impactful changes has been the automation of previously manual tasks, particularly in the budgeting and forecasting processes.
Now it’s all automatic and easy. We have our Excel, click refresh, and everything is ready. In the monthly close, it saves us many hours, maybe days.
Barry LinDirector of FP&A
Comprehensive Financial Visibility
Datarails provides Barry with a holistic view of Guesty’s finances, allowing him to see not just the annual budget and actuals, but also detailed insights such as trends, amortized expenses, and approved purchase orders that haven’t yet been paid.
We didn’t have this before, and it’s super useful for me. It’s helped me understand the whole picture.
Advanced Reporting and Visualization
The Datarails dashboards and drill-down features have been game-changers for Barry and all of the stakeholders, including the management team.
I really love the dashboards. The graphs and the ability to drill down into the graphs to see what happened is amazing for me.
Barry has been able to create detailed reports that were previously out of reach, such as a usage report that tracks the annual budget, actual expenses, and unrecognized OPEX.
With everything consolidated in Datarails, Barry can also provide managers and employees with payroll and terms confidentially, and based on permissions set automatically.
Improved Accuracy and Strategic Focus
The ability to ‘refresh’ and have real-time data within their spreadsheets has drastically reduced manual work for Lin. As a result, team efficiency has risen, and time is being spent on more strategic value-added work.
“We’re now able to catch issues much more quickly,” Barry notes.
I have so much more time to do things that I didn’t have the time to even consider doing, and now I’m doing it.
Barry LinDirector of FP&A
