Successfully building a source of truth for financial data after another FP&A tool failed to deliver

Postscript is an SMS platform that enables brands to develop relationships, deliver experiences, drive results through text messaging.

Challenge: 

• Postscript’s finance team needed to gather data from Quickbooks, Salesforce, and Snowflake in order to run their reports, which required a ton of manual SQL queries and exports
• Additionally, they wanted to roll up their Excel-based models into a central database so they could deploy it across the company’s various Google Sheets to collaborate with other departments
• They ended up going with a different FP&A tool that is also Excel-native, hoping it would fix these issues—but it couldn't live up to its promises
• Unfortunately, after 6 months of fighting with their complicated data models, Postscript still wasn’t able to integrate their Snowflake data using the other tool

Solution: 

• Postscript decided to implement Aleph as a “rip and replace” of their previous tool
• Their team set out to use Aleph to create a central source of truth for all of their financial data plus their models that they create in Excel 
• Their finance team syncs their models in Aleph and then pulls them into various Google Sheets to collaborate with other teams and stakeholders
• They use Aleph to get instant access to their financial data in all of their models and run them significantly faster

Results: 

• Their team set up integrations with Snowflake, Salesforce, and Quickbooks in under a day, and was fully onboarded within a week
• Chris estimates that Aleph has given their team the output of another FTE FP&A Manager without adding a headcount 
• The speed and quality of their reporting has improved drastically. For example, they can get budget versus actuals by department within a day
• Chris is now able to answer ad hoc questions from leadership much more effectively, because of how quickly he can shift and transform data to compare scenarios 
• Chris is able to spend more time building thoughtful narratives and adding commentary to reports, rather than just gathering data
• Ally saves a full day each reporting cycle on manual work, and various reports and models take him between 50 - 75% less time to create