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Faster Budgeting and Quarterly Reforecasting Leads to More Strategic Planning
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
The Challenge
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.
About The Customer
Four Star Freightliner is a freightliner dealership with seven locations throughout Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Each dealership has four lines of business: new truck sales, used truck sales, parts, and services. The company's slogan, 'We'll Keep You Rolling,' reflects the importance of its parts and services lines of business. Truckers throughout the region rely on Four Star Freightliner to keep their vehicles in good working order. The company has grown rapidly in recent years, expanding from six to seven dealerships and increasing its workforce from 130 to 200 employees.
The Solution
In 2016, Four Star Freightliner decided to look for an alternative to Excel for their budgeting process. They invited three budgeting vendors to demonstrate their budgeting and planning platforms and ultimately chose Centage. The Centage platform offered several key features that made it the ideal solution for Four Star Freightliner. Firstly, it made the process of building a budget easier with its pre-programmed business logic and accounting rules. These ensured that all inputs were processed according to the company's unique business structure and automatically updated all outputs, such as the P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. Secondly, the platform offered a comprehensive personnel budgeting module where company employees could be entered either individually or in groups of similar work functions. Lastly, the platform provided robust ad hoc reporting, delivering timely and visually meaningful reports and dashboards that enabled business managers to make better decisions, faster.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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