Our client manages a $150 million budget for their organization covering nearly 100 employees and 50 vendor programs. Like financial teams at many companies, they historically relied heavily on elaborate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track transactions and report results. There was no centralized system for storing financial transactions such as travel and entertainment, invoices, check requests, currency conversions, reconciliations, etc. Monthly reporting was manual and tedious, requiring a dedicated full-time person.
We started by building a relationship with the key stakeholders and gained a deep understanding of the budgeting process, monthly reporting process, and key deliverables. We implemented a SQL Server data warehouse to store the organization’s financial data and partnered with several internal and external organizations to set up ETL file transfers from various source systems using Pentaho. We built Tableau reports and dashboards to track budget forecasts, spend, variances, breakdowns by vendor, budget categories, departments, etc.
Successful delivery of this solution resulted in high client satisfaction, saved over $250,000 of software costs compared to a COTS product the client was considering prior to our solution, transformed our client’s data collection methods, analytics, and insights into their programs. The data warehouse has grown to include several additional data sets and a larger user base. It also enabled our client to start a data science center of excellence.