Client Story: OVG helps $1B software client build FP&A from scratch

Client needs to quickly build FP&A capabilities following acquisition

Following a private equity acquisition, this client was tasked with building a global FP&A function starting with a new VP and only one remaining team member. The client’s sponsors were focused on driving bottom-line improvement across the company’s ~10 products through both top-line growth and cost optimization.

Business operators were accustomed to running their products independently and many did not have sufficient visibility into their financial performance and opportunities to optimize margins. There was no central planning process and business partnership between FP&A and operators was virtually non-existent. The team also struggled with significantly expanded reporting requirements for sponsors.

OVG helps the client to lay a solid planning foundation

OVG was engaged to lead the initial implementation of Anaplan for the client. OVG helped the client to source and cleanse key financial and operational data and build planning models for both subscription- and transaction-based revenue, vendor-level operating expenses, and employee-level headcount. The team deployed extensive reporting to largely automate the client’s 100+ slide BOD reporting package, expanding beyond core financials to cover topline KPIs as well.

Within 16 weeks, the client was able to run monthly rolling forecasts from volume to EBITDA and cash flow in the system. The new team was able to successfully navigate its first annual planning cycle with support from OVG.

As the client FP&A team grew and new resources ramped, OVG helped to onboard and train them on both the process and system.

Improving planning across the business

After FP&A had its critical infrastructure in place, the team continued onto several other more strategic and process-related projects, including:

• Unwinding and simplifying corporate allocations that had proliferated over time.

• Interviewing key stakeholders across the organization to identify revenue growth opportunities, synthesizing results for finance leadership early in planning.

• Designing a new ‘Estimated Booking Metric’ in partnership with Global Revenue Operations, identifying key drivers, designing and testing different modeling approaches, and implementing the final model in Salesforce. The new metric was a ~35% improvement over the status quo in terms of estimating 1^st year revenue for the client’s B2B channel.

• Conducting workshops to align the business on definitions of key metrics and hierarchies for reporting, such as a new sales channel concept introduced by Sales and Revenue Operations.

With a combination of improvements in both planning process and technology, the client was able to stand up the team quickly, support the business more effectively, and meet leadership expectations.