The FP&A need for the Kirmac team
Jeff Mackay, Director of Finance at Kirmac was on the hunt for a software to automate their financial reporting.
Having used other tools in the past, Mackay struggled to find a solution that met all their FP&A needs. Jeff was looking for an easy-to-manage platform that he could manage himself and had easy integrations.
A common challenge they experienced with previous FP&A tools was being at the mercy of support, which was very slow, and having to do a lot of “fixing” and back-end work steering them away from value-added tasks, such as revenue-generating analysis.
Lastly, his team also spent too much time doing “checks and balances” to ensure financial reporting was done properly and ensuring data integrity.
The solution: one source of truth with data integrity
Datarails “checked all those boxes” explains Mackay.
After an “easy” implementation and integration, he shares that they were able to get up and running fairly easily with Datarails.
With an interface that “runs a lot more seamlessly,” Mackay and his team could focus on more value-added tasks.
Having Datarails integrated with all their systems and delivering one source of truth meant that much of their data integrity risk was alleviated.
“Now you have confidence in the system that you can just refresh the information and have confidence in your data.”
Jeff Mackay
Director of Finance, Kirmac
Mackay also mentioned his love for Excel pointing out Datarails’ native integration is one of his favorite features. “We’re very Excel-driven here,” he says. “We like Excel, especially in finance, that’s the world we live in.”
The five active Datarails users rely on Datarails for all of their financial statements, operational reporting, HR dashboards, and financial dashboards.
“It’s visual so it’s easy to go in there and modify and change things without any training or support,” Mackay adds.
Navigating Finance and Operations
Mackay explains his perspective on being a finance director in the auto body repair shop industry and the power of translating the numbers into actionable insights for the rest of the business. He says, “You’ve got your finance hat, my standard P&Ls, balance sheets, compliant related statements. And the operational component. How do we mirror the two together.”
As not all of their end users are trained in finance, it’s important to modify it to suit their needs.
“Know your audience”, says Mackay.
“Creating reports and dashboards that’s going to work for them is crucial to their success.”
“That’s why it’s nice to have datarails because we can modify it to something that somebody can really, understand”
Jeff Mackay
Director of Finance, Kirmac
The impact: diving deeper into the numbers brings results
Previously the stakeholders in the company struggled to get a deeper dive into the numbers and understand what’s going on.
Mackay says: “Now they have a lot more information at their fingertips and can drill into the details and get that information they need.”
The ease of use saved them a lot of valuable time to do more value-add tasks.
“Everybody has access to it and runs their statements since it’s easy to navigate around. They can change the dates and the reports for their reporting and do detailed extracts.”
Visual and customizable data
Jeff shares that the store managers learned a lot from having the data presented that way. “We can modify and customize data how we like.”
He shares that the dashboards help the store managers effectively run their business in their area.
“We never really had that before, looking at the trends, looking at opportunities. It helps with running the operations from the backend perspective.”
Jeff Mackay
Director of Finance, Kirmac
For him and his team, Mackay adds: “It really saves us a lot of time on just running financial statements. I can simply click refresh and get all the data ready.”
“Everything’s set up so you just change the date, refresh, and all of a sudden you have your information.”
Jeff Mackay
Director of Finance, Kirmac
Less Manual work and more efficiency at Kirmac
Mackay adds that they’re now able to effectively do more work with their team.
They went from doing integrity checks, system changes, and dealing with different platforms, which took a lot of time, effort, and energy to now doing more in-depth analytics and better process improvements.
“It frees up a lot more time from an ROI perspective within the team since we can do more value-add stuff instead of sitting there just troubleshooting.”
Jeff Mackay
Director of Finance, Kirmac
Mackay shared a prime example of how Datarails has helped with efficiency and strategic planning:
“The integration to get a new store set up within datarails was almost seamless. We were able to layer on a new store in Datarails, and off it went.”
From a business goal perspective, Kirmac is aggressively trying to grow their business and Datarails is a crucial financial underpinning to this expansion.
Mackay concludes: “We know that Datarails can handle it with ease. It gives us a lot of confidence in our growth trajectory that we are partnered up with the right platform for growth.”