My name is Michelle Ferris, I am the Director of Finance for All Star Directories. We are a marketing company based in Seattle. We do lead generation for post secondary education.
In 2015 when our company implemented Prophix as a solution, my title was Senior Staff Accountant. We used to be stuck in a non-stop close loop, with only a few calendar days between the end of a close and the start of a new close. We used Excel for everything and it was prone to errors and breakages. Budgeting was cumbersome and inaccurate, we had to peanut butter everything which caused perpetual variances. Data was hard to get, manage and report on.
Since then, I have been promoted to Assistant Controller and Director of Finance. Prophix has enhanced my ability to be successful in my career by allowing me to focus on completing timely and accurate close cycles, revamping the budgeting processes, and modernizing our financial statements to provide better insights. This would not have been possible without Prophix.
I have become more confident in the data I am providing to stakeholders, have better visuals to present and can make changes in moments. Prophix has made my work life a ton better along the way.
You mentioned that before Prophix you only had a few calendar days free between close cycles. It sounds like Prophix significantly improved the quality of your data, but did it shorten your close cycle too? If so, by how much -and where was the biggest time savings found? Thank you for sharing your success story!
Hi Ryan,
We were spending at least two weeks closing the books. Now we are done in 8 days. The biggest differences are, we only have one source of data (Prophix) and we are not using Excel for our financial statements.
-Michelle
Hi Jessica,
Our budgeting process is more streamlined. We use workflow to allow budget owners to enter their data directly into Prophix, which saves our team a lot of time. We use Detailed Planning Manager to accurately plan for personnel. We had been spreading costs like healthcare evenly across the whole org and now we can plan everything by person. We can easily cap out taxes, no more manual calc’s there! And reporting is automated so we change a named set and leave the reports alone for the planning and forecasting we do. It is much easier and allows for us to focus on more important things.
-Michelle
You mentioned that you work for a marketing company. Do you incorporate any other types of data in prophix other than financial? Like utilization, time, etc. ?
Hi Marissa,
We pull in non financial data only as it relates to specific KPI’s such as lead delivery data and traffic data. We also use statistical accounts to input goals so we can measure against them.
-Michelle
Congrats Michelle! It makes a world of difference with a transparent system like Prophix, doesn’t it? Gives us all the confidence we need to effectively analyze and create great reports. Love it! Thank you for sharing!
