Centage

Amwaste, LLC, a full-service waste and recycling company, was facing challenges in managing its budgeting process due to its complex organizational structure. The company is a collection of multiple entities, each requiring its own budget and forecast. Additionally, an overall budget and forecast is needed for the parent company, Matter Management Enterprises. Each service offered by Amwaste has unique business drivers that shape the companies. For instance, in the residential pickup business, revenue is driven by the number of homes under contract or serviced, while expenses are driven by days in the month. Roll-off customers are charged based on the number of services provided, while commercial front load customers are charged a fixed monthly fee, but the longer the month, the higher the labor costs. Initially, Amwaste had just three entities, each of which had its own QuickBooks database and budget. To create an annual budget, Amwaste’s CFO, David Carlisle, pulled data from the three QuickBooks databases and manually re-entered it into three separate Excel spreadsheets. Once the spreadsheets were completed he rolled them up to a single budget for the company.

Urban Ventures, a nonprofit social services organization, was facing challenges with their budgeting and planning process. Their long list of services, including options from prenatal care all the way through adult life, created many challenges, especially when combined with budgeting and planning for their biggest expense – their employees. Some of the 75+ team members were part time, some were seasonal, and others were full-time, and everything from unemployment insurance rates, taxes (employee and employer), salaries, insurance etc. - all needed to be budgeted and planned for. At the time, Urban Ventures was doing all the budgeting and planning in Excel, with Microsoft Dynamics GP providing the necessary data export/import and reporting features.

Arawak Port Development (APD) is a critical enterprise for The Bahamian Government and its citizens, with all international ocean freight passing over their bulkhead at Nassau Container Port. After going public in 2012, APD needed to start producing a range of financial statements that would satisfy the quarterly and annual filing requirements of the Securities Commission of The Bahamas, provide sufficient information to external auditors, and enable the APD Board of Directors to better manage the growth of the organization. APD's CFO, Dion Bethell, also wanted to increase the level of detail in his planning, while concurrently weaning the management team away from budgeting for items that had a low likelihood of occurring. Because APD is a critical economic hub for the country of The Bahamas, there was no room for error.

The Children’s Institute of Pittsburgh, a nonprofit organization serving children with special needs and their families, was facing challenges with their financial reporting and budgeting processes. The organization had recently expanded from one company to five, adding complexity to their financial management. They needed to separate out the financials into five separate entities but also perform reporting at a consolidated level for their financial statements and audit purposes. They were using Planning Maestro strictly for budgeting and Dynamics GP for running pre-existing hard-coded reports, which was a time-consuming and difficult process. The organization was not fully utilizing the capabilities of Planning Maestro, and the manual processes in Excel were prone to inaccuracies and errors.

Momentum Midstream, an independent midstream energy company, was facing challenges with their budgeting and forecasting processes. They were relying on spreadsheets to manage these processes, but as the company grew and the processes became more complex, it became clear that the manual process was too inefficient and error-prone. Momentum’s business model and revenue stream depend on them providing a turn-key natural gas production facility, planning for the physical capacity of over a billion dollars in property plant and equipment, and also the human capacity in terms of a trained and productive workforce. Being able to accurately forecast the resulting demand for cash over an 18-24 month pre-production cycle is paramount to their success. They were spending far too much time chasing down broken links and double-checking formulas for errors.

ClearTrack Information Network, a supply chain software and services company, was facing challenges in managing its financial health due to the limitations of traditional Excel spreadsheets and basic accounting software. The company's financial executive, Traci Triplett, was relying on these outdated systems to manage ClearTrack’s financial health. However, these systems were creating time-consuming errors and redundancies that the small business could not afford. Understanding cash flow was critical to the company’s success, yet the limitations of the current system were hindering this understanding. With a lean financial team, Triplett needed a more efficient way to budget and forecast. She conducted an industry-wide search to find an automated system that would best meet her needs.

Wood’s Homes, a multi-service, non-profit children’s mental health center based in Calgary, was facing a significant challenge in managing its financial operations. As a large organization with over 450 staff and 100 volunteers, it provides 35 programs and services for 20,000 children and their families each year. The Finance Manager, Pat Keppler, was responsible for more than 122 financial statements, across 35 programs, many backed by 5-6 different funders. The organization was using a traditional spreadsheet-based approach to budgeting and forecasting which lacked the capabilities necessary to effectively manage the large volume of data. With over 7,000 account codes and associated individual budgets, the organization needed a more strategic financial tool to manage effective growth and continue to support the needs of its community.

Community Care, Inc., a nonprofit organization, was struggling with its budgeting process. Initially, they implemented an automated budgeting tool in 2004 to streamline financial activities. However, the software was not user-friendly enough for operations managers, leading to inaccurate budget updates and resistance to further training. The organization reverted to using Excel spreadsheets for budget management, with each department responsible for its own worksheet. This manual consolidation of information was laborious and did not guarantee accuracy. As the organization grew, this method became increasingly ineffective. When Director of Reimbursement & Financial Planning executive Kyle Raeder joined the company, he and Community Care, Inc.’s Chief Financial Officer Lawrence Paplham decided it was time to evaluate and deploy a more robust budgeting and forecasting tool.

SerenaGroup, a global healthcare management company, was facing challenges with its financial structure. The company operates across multiple locations, each of which is considered a separate cost center. This structure required the creation of a full profit and loss statement for each individual site every reporting period. The company's existing solution, QuickBooks Enterprise, was capable of producing the individual P&Ls, but it did not support the consolidation of these into a summarized report. The workaround involved a time-consuming process of exporting and merging spreadsheets in Excel, which took 2-3 days every month. This process was prone to errors and did not allow for precise forecasting. Additionally, SerenaGroup needed to allocate overhead expenses to individual facilities, which added another layer of complexity to the process.

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a non-profit trade association, was facing significant challenges with their budgeting and planning solution, Microsoft Forecaster. The software had several shortcomings that were critical for CompTIA to address. Internationally based users were frequently locked out of the software on the server in Chicago, struggling to simply access or record their budget numbers. The application couldn’t roll forward prior budgets or utilize actuals. CFO Brian Laffey lamented, “You always had to build budgets from the ground up.” Creating unique reports consumed Laffey’s finance team every month. Specific parameters that each manager wanted to see had to be identified monthly for the report view to be created. The process involved downloading data to Excel, filtering and sorting the data, and then individually creating each report.

Mountain View Hospital, a healthcare facility in Idaho Falls, Idaho, was facing challenges with its budgeting and forecasting process. The hospital, which has over 1,000 employees and more than 60 departments and cost centers, was using Excel for these processes. However, as the hospital continued to grow, Excel became increasingly difficult to use, especially when adding new acquisitions or modifying projections. Simple modifications posed significant risk of errors due to the necessary changes in formulas and formats. The hospital's expansive budget spreadsheet had grown to over 40 tabs, making it impossible to perform meaningful what-if scenarios or analyze the data in a detailed manner. If the hospital continued to use Excel and continued to grow, it would likely have needed additional staff.

Four Star Freightliner, a freightliner dealership with seven locations throughout Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, was struggling with its budgeting process. The company's financial team relied heavily on the budget to monitor the business's health, track progress towards goals, and provide early warnings if actuals were off and adjustments were needed. However, the process of creating the company's budget using spreadsheets was cumbersome and time-consuming, taking up to two months to build and an additional week to manually enter into the ERP system. The lack of adaptability of spreadsheets hindered the company's ability to reforecast each quarter and assess how well they were tracking towards their goals. Budgeting for employee expenses and keeping up with revenue and cost of sales by location was also challenging. The company's rapid growth, from six to seven dealerships and from 130 to 200 employees, compounded these challenges.

Heartland LLC, a private equity sponsored business in the commercial landscape maintenance, property enhancement and snow removal sector, was facing a challenge in supporting its aggressive growth strategy. The company's strategy was both M&A and organically focused, acquiring founder-owned commercial landscape and maintenance companies to provide them with financial backing and a systems architecture. However, the company was struggling with its existing FP&A platform, which was not able to support the company's growth plan. The company had two companies, one of which used QuickBooks, and the other used Asset, a platform designed for the landscape business. The company needed a more straightforward and scalable solution to support its growth and provide a single source of truth in terms of the budget, forecast and actuals.

Wakeland Housing and Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization that develops affordable housing communities, was facing challenges with its financial forecasting. The organization's major revenue stream comes from developer fees, which are built into the financial structure of each development. These fees are earned based on triggered mechanisms such as when the development team completes construction, closes permanent financing, and receives form 8609 from the IRS. Prior to discovering Centage, Wakeland was using an Excel spreadsheet for its pro forma budget, which was difficult to update and manage on an ongoing basis. The spreadsheet was not providing the analytic information needed and forecasting future cash was a difficult process. The accounting team was also responsible for managing the effects of Wakeland’s pipeline, which required them to project cash flow, balance sheet, and P&L. If a milestone was late, the team had to recreate the forecasts in their spreadsheets, which was time-consuming.

Price Family Vineyards & Estates, a family of vineyards and wineries in Sonoma County, California, was facing challenges in consolidating the financial statements of each of its entities and preparing individual budgets for each LLC. The business was growing and the existing system, which relied heavily on Excel, was proving to be time-consuming and prone to errors. Additionally, the company was looking for a new accounting software to replace the winery-specific system it had been using, one that its sales teams would find more intuitive and user-friendly. After considering several options, they decided to switch to QuickBooks Premier due to its ability to integrate with multiple third-party software platforms that the sales teams were actively using.

Carroll County Memorial Hospital (CCMH), a 25-bed Critical Access Hospital with over 250 employees, was facing challenges with its budgeting and planning process. The hospital was using Excel for these tasks, which proved to be cumbersome due to manual data entry and broken formulas. One of the significant issues was the inability to involve different departments in their portion of the budgeting process. This lack of involvement led to a lack of accountability and collaboration, which was detrimental to the overall budgeting process.

Equitas Health, a regional nonprofit community healthcare system, was facing challenges with its budgeting and planning process. The organization, which has over 500 employees across 21 offices and 25 different departments, was using Excel for budgeting and planning. The budget would be created in Excel and then uploaded into their accounting system, Abila, to run their monthly reports. This process was long, complex, and prone to errors. The complexity was further compounded by the fact that department heads within the organization would create their own initial versions of their department budgets. These budgets would then be submitted as separate spreadsheets to the Finance team who would add them to the larger company budget. Given the number of departments and the multiple people that were working on the individual budgets, version control and errors were common, and the consolidation process was time intensive and cumbersome.

The Housing Authority of Snohomish County (HASCO) is a nonprofit, government agency that provides housing solutions for the people and communities of Snohomish County in Washington state. HASCO has two primary sources of revenue – reimbursement they receive from “HUD” – the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development – for the Section Eight housing vouchers they administer and rental income from the properties the organization owns throughout the county. Prior to discovering Centage, Jenny Barker, senior budget manager at HASCO, and her team had been using Excel for their budgeting and planning. However, due to the complex requirements of being a government entity, especially when it came to managing and tracking multiple allocations, Excel was not powerful enough to meet their needs.

The Wildlife Gallery, the largest tannery for the taxidermy industry in the United States, was facing challenges with their annual budgeting process. The organization, which offers tanning, skinning, trophy room design, and fine woodwork services across six locations in Michigan, Texas, and Alaska, was using a combination of Excel, QuickBooks, and NetSuite for their financial planning. However, these tools were not ideal for their needs. The process of consolidating spreadsheets and uploading them into their ERP system for reporting was time-consuming and prone to errors. The CFO, Nate Walters, described it as a very manual process. The company needed a more sophisticated solution that would integrate with NetSuite and provide a faster, more streamlined process.