Automating Budgeting & Forecasting with DOMO
The Situation
A digital media & broadcasting company needed to improve its budgeting & forecasting process, as they were manually leveraging inputs from disparate sources to forecast revenue for the financial year. The inputs were based on forecasts provided by a CRM tool (i.e., based on the stage of the deal and probability of conversion to final stage), as well as inputs from individual LOB stakeholders that were not captured in the CRM tool. Because of this, the Company was manually consolidating the data and tracking the forecasts on Excel, rendering the process time-consuming and error-prone. The Company engaged Merilytics (an Accordion Company) to streamline and automate the integration of data from different sources and (CRM and manual inputs) and build DOMO dashboard to forecast the revenue.
Services
Reporting & Analytics
The Execution
- Developed data pipelines to ingest incremental data weekly from CRM to DOMO ETL platforms.
- Enabled the incorporation of manual data inputs from LOB stakeholders by providing individual G-Sheets (connected to DOMO ETL platform).
- Set up manual inputs to be fed into the G-Sheets, which flow into the final forecasts on DOMO.
- Built a data transformation flow to cleanse and combine data using DOMO’s integrated SQL editor.
- Performed necessary data transformations using SQL to estimate revenue based on deal stages and appropriate conversion factors while considering corporate haircut.
- Deployed consolidated dashboards to capture the quarterly/yearly revenue forecasts at LOB & region levels, providing visibility into forecasts, budgets, and actuals that help the FP&A team monitor company performance against the targets.
The Results
By streamlining and automating the Company’s budgeting & forecasting tools, Merilytics (an Accordion Company) helped enable real-time visibility into company performance and generate real-time inputs for accurate revenue forecasts. Overall, automating the weekly reports reduced the team’s manual effort by over 70 percent and led to more informed business decision-making.