Data Dance: Turning Complexity into Cash Flow Symphony

Testimonial

“Our Cash Flow Tool is the single most important tool we use, as leadership, to make sure we’re making good decisions for the business. Our tool has always been good, but Zeritaz’s new approach has really taken it the next level! Before, we got what we needed but there were always small questions about the accuracy of “actuals figures” for comparison and it took a while to produce each month. Now we have no doubt in the accuracy of it and it gets to us over a week sooner.”

- Founder, CEO

Company Info

Industry: Professional Services

Revenue: ~$6M/annum

Other: Consistently growing at ~10%/annum

Overview & Situation

This client operates in a very cash intensive business so monitoring Working Capital and providing insights to the organization’s cash activity is paramount. We operated a legacy tool for them they already had, using traditional methods that work for most of our clients, but after operating this tool for 8+months, it became apparent to us that this client required a more advanced solution. Some of the contributing factors to this necessity were:

- The intricacies of this clients’ activities

- The sheer volume of monthly transactions they had

- The multiple data sources needed to complete the report

- The format that leadership liked to view this report, which required data mapping

These factors combined to create both accuracy and efficiency issues that needed to be addressed.

Solution

The Zeritaz team identified the need to build a more advanced data infrastructure that could be customized to handle various report formats, manipulate data into a specific format, and handle bulk data mapping, all automatically. We also needed to alter our sources of data to resolve our accuracy issues. Ultimately, we ended up pulling more precise reports from QBO and building a Power Query data infrastructure in Excel, hosted in the Cloud. With Power Query we were able to refine a semi-manual process into a simple process of dropping reports in designated folders and allowing the data model to update the entire Cash Flow workbook automatically!

Impact

Immediately prior to this update, the Cash Flow Tool required ~40hrs per month to update from start to finish. With Power Query in place, this process now takes 3 minutes and guarantees 99.99% accuracy, leaving time for valuable analysis with leadership.