Kantata Helps Hero Digital Achieve 90-Day Financial Forecasting Accuracy
Industry
Advertising/Marketing/Media
Client
Hero Digital
What Kantata Replaced
Google Sheets (for forecasting/accounting close)
The Challenge
Hero Digital’s continuous growth created a need to accurately and efficiently forecast revenue. However, forecasts for custom contracts, such as T&M, fixed fee and retainers, were difficult to create. Hero’s project and accounting teams spent an extraordinary amount of administrative time forecasting and recognizing revenue via manual spreadsheets. As a result, Hero sought out Kantata.
Hero Digital is a leading independent customer experience company focused on holistic processes and integrated methods that help leading brands achieve growth.
The Solution
Accurate Forecasting
Hero Digital needed to replace manual data analysis in forecasting. Supported by the Kantata BI team, Hero aligned core EAC and revenue metrics with business processes. Project accounting records captured actual revenue for contract specific resource data-based forecasts congruent with revenue recognition rules.
Solution Scalability
Hero Digital’s expansion required scaling financial reporting. Kantata’s technical services team integrated Hero’s core metrics, resourcing and project data with NetSuite’s revenue module to automate sales orders and fulfillments, creating accuracy and consistency.
Accessible Data
Hero Digital no longer depends on complicated spreadsheets to analyze critical business data. Kantata provides needed revenue, project burn, cost, margin and other relevant data.
Benefits
- 40% faster month-end accounting close
- 90-day financial forecasting accuracy
- Percent complete calculation includes revenue actuals
- Custom revenue metric capturing all contract types
Increase in billable utilization
Compliance with time tracking
The Results
Forecasting The Future
Kantata forecasting capabilities help Hero’s managers understand project needs and make faster decisions about the future of a project, with clarity about the weeks and months ahead. Forecasting is done for many different statements of work structures and a wide variety of work, with forecasting reaching an accuracy over 90 days.
Shorter Accounting Close Cycles
Kantata’s fast reporting capabilities have made Hero’s accounting department’s time to close 40% faster, speeding up from as many as 20 days to now an average 10-day close.
Faster, Stronger Processes
Kantata’s reporting capabilities access crucial information for both client teams and internal work. Kantata has helped the company better understand unstaffed work, risks to project success and the need for contract work.
Insights and Actions
Now, Hero Digital has a more reliable resource and capacity view, a better understanding of hiring needs and the ability to understand project actuals on demand, including current project margin and estimated margin at completion. Additionally, Kantata’s Netsuite integration automatically creates sales orders and fulfillments in Netsuite with the press of a button.
"Our forecast metrics are so accurate that sometimes I feel like a fortune teller."
Director of Client Finance, Hero Digital
