Nailing the data to nail the decisions:
How Unified Reporting
Strengthened Global Business Strategy
The CEO wanted to report on all regions and business units consistently, comparing apples with apples. But as a growing business moving through development and acquisitions, each region and business unit had their own approach to delivering metrics.
For the regional CFO, the challenge was to make consistent reporting and like-for- like comparison possible, uncovering all the issues hidden by the many different reporting strategies.
BEFORE
BEFORE
AFTER
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
CHALLENGE
The new CFO of CMEA (France, Austria, South Africa and the Middle East) was juggling reports and figures that didn’t relate to each other. Like trying to make big business decisions with a blindfold on, they needed data that was comparable, accurate and most importantly reliable to impress the global CFO and nail their new role. The problem was:
A series of acquisitions and territory mergers had left each region with a unique approach to reporting — and vastly different outcomes.
With thousands of publications and subscription types on offer, there were lots of different data types to weave together.
Teams calculated metrics according to how they were recorded operationally, so there was no way to validate or cross-check for accuracy.
Sales performance was measured by billings: there was no consistency when tracking new business, cancellations, upsells or downsells.
VISION
The global and regional CFOs pictured a future where:
Sales performance and effort are measured by ACV (Annualised Contract Value) and subscriber base (total number and value of subscriptions per month), allowing them to compare by territory and time period.
Teams are more active, more analytical and ready to meet the new demands of the business.
WHY NOW?
Following our success with the UK finance team, we were called on to modernise reporting systems for CMEA.
Before, each team generated their numbers using their preferred tools. For one region, that meant using a heavily customised PeopleSoft, basing their financial reports on the operational coding applied to subscriptions. Another region was purely spreadsheet-based and relied heavily on teams knowing the customer base and what had happened when.
Not only was the technology and approach different in each area, the definitions of sales drivers were different. In some cases, they were taken for granted or even unknown. For example, the definition of a cancel for one region was based on the marketing requirement, which flagged customers at risk of cancellation. Great for marketing purposes, but not accurate for finance.
This meant that:
Numbers weren’t adding up. Different reports gave different answers to the same question.
Information entered by operations teams fed directly into finance reporting. So accurate reports relied on accurate coding elsewhere in the business.
Finance reporting didn’t reflect the true state of sales drivers as the classifications were made using different definitions and priorities.
HOW WE DID IT
STEP ONE Principles first
We started simple. Let’s define a unit of work: one subscription. Then, we established the rules for whether the subscription should be counted in any given period, and which drivers it should contribute to (new business, cancel, upsell, downsell, like-for-like, etc).
We played back our rules, calculations and logic in Excel. It’s a cheap, effective and most-importantly client-friendly way to share our findings and create the transparency the finance team need to gain confidence before we commit to building software.
UNEXPECTED STEP Discrepancies corrected
During our discovery phase, we corrected a $10 million discrepancy in reporting caused by the old method over the last 4 years. We shared this with the CFOs and got the go-ahead to implement our new approach.
STEP TWO The new approach
For the new system to work, it had to be flexible enough to accommodate local variance, but consistent enough to allow meaningful comparison. We had to define and implement business rules for comparison.
• When should we recognise new business? In the free trial period or when payments start?
• What are the rules for win-backs in each region and across product groups and families?
• What constitutes a like-for-like renewal?
• How do we differentiate product option swaps from upsells and downsells?
STEP THREE Updating the system to match
Based on our agreed formulas and new rules, we developed repeatable reporting that teams can trust. As this level of processing is beyond Excel, we used Oracle — a system the team already had access to — to do the heavy lifting. But, as ever, we presented our output data in Excel: the tool the team know best. This way they can validate, cross check and apply transformations quickly and efficiently.
RESULT
We delivered accurate, reliable and trusted metrics that unified CMEA reporting. This helped the CFO support the CEO to compare and improve regional performance.
The team now has:
Accuracy A highly accurate system with a complete timeline of every change to every subscription.
Rigour The ability to test, validate and prove their figures: as rigorous and transparent at subscription level as they are across an entire portfolio.
Automation Daily reporting instead of manual reporting 4 days after month- end, allowing CFOs to see change and act with agility and responsiveness. Performance meetings are now held weekly instead of monthly. There are fewer month-end surprises and it’s no longer make or break.
Comparable data Unified reporting across different units. The CFOs can see how each region is performing in context and have robust conversations to move things forward.
Accountability A clear idea of definitions, boundaries, progress and targets, keeping everyone motivated and accountable.
Outlier is a trusted partner because I know the team will get things over the line every time without fuss.
We approached Outlier for the PR24 systemisation because they’ve delivered to a high standard on other projects for us. As a trusted partner, we knew they could give us unbiased insights on what was needed to deliver PR24.
As expected, the team’s work was methodical, risk-based and impartial. Theygathered the right team of experts and genuinely partnered with our internal teams to weed through countless layers of data and systems to streamline our processes.
Ultimately, they delivered something straightforward and functional that the team could actually work with.
For me, knowing that I had Outlier on the case gave me one less thing to worry about in a sea of high-priority projects. I know that David and the team will get things over the line every time without fail. They’re a safe pair of hands whom I trust absolutely to deliver with no fuss.”
Morgan McCarthy
Southern Water
Company sells subscriptions to legal, government, business and technical information sources.
$10M
hole in the numbers
$0
hole in the numbers
4 territories
=
4 reporting
methods
4 territories
=
1 reporting
method
Monthly reports
completed manually 4 days after month-end
Daily reports
completed automatically every night