The Alasko finance team needed a tool that would allow all team members, in Finance, Sales, and Procurement, to benefit from accessible data in Excel, analytics, and visualizations.
The problem: Wasting weeks’ worth of time with inefficient processes
Tereza Sahakian, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at Alasko, says saving time was her top priority as they looked for an FP&A solution. Before Datarails, she spent countless hours consolidating all of their files. For budget season, in particular, the repetitive process of consolidating everything before Datarails, took hours.
The Alasko team sought out Datarails to ensure that all their financials are updated in real-time and processes are simple and continual.
Tereza noted that using Datarails would mean not needing to spend time adjusting, mapping, calculating, or recalculating the data.
The solution: Easy comparisons, scenarios and for different teams
Finance teams are no strangers to running countless version comparisons and different analyses for different stakeholders.
For Tereza, it was no different.
She needed to run different comparisons and scenarios without wasting hours of her time. She points out their budgeting processes and sales data involved looking at “the sales this year versus last year and running analyses on which channels are working best.”
They also carry out analyses and filter by periods, channels, and products and check how the sales rep is doing in regards to their budget versus actuals.
The Datarails dashboards give them an easy view of what’s going on. The visualizations can easily be adapted by teams or needs that arise.
“If you know how to use the system, you can really do a lot. Once your data is prepped, you can create dashboards for visualizations, perform calculations, and create formulas.” Tereza adds.
Alongside her, Tereza has 5 other finance team members, the entire sales team, and the procurement team who benefit from Datarails as end users.
The must-have feature: The Excel Add-in
When asked what is the best Datarails feature? Tereza felt that having the ability to work with Excel and upload their data there is a big win.
She says “I enjoy working with Excel. I can create and manipulate my tables. I’m feeding the system and in just one shot I can open my table in Excel and ask it whatever information I need.”
“It’s a great tool. I also work with BI systems and I know that you cannot build your data or the tables the way that Datarails does. This is the first thing that I adore.”
Tereza Sahakian
Director of Financial Planning and Analysis
The budgeting in Datarails is also a feature Alasko loves. She adds, “Based on the actuals and using the datarails formulas, I can create my budget templates and it’s pretty easy.”
Budget season: Creating a new normal for Alasko
Preparing for budget season is a process that used to take up a large portion of the finance team’s time. Consolidating and creating the necessary templates alone, took her weeks. This is on top of the heavy full-day’s work she faced every budget cycle.
Now, with Datarails, she says, “all the customer and sales data we need, and with the filtering capabilities in Excel, I now get all these templates per customer, per sales rep, per product.”
“This feature saved me a few weeks worth of work. I now get it done in a day.”
Tereza Sahakian
Director of Financial Planning and Analysis
Without Datarails, this process would have taken her months to complete. Alasko finally has an efficient budgeting process which makes Budgeting Season a breeze.