Branch's Journey to Accurate, Speedy, and Insightful Business Scaling

Branch is a venture-backed company with a finance team that plays a key role in their country-wide expansion plans. The company has four product offerings and has expanded from 5 to 50 states. The finance team is responsible for planning by product, geography, and acquisition channel. The team was previously struggling with the limitations of Excel for their complex multi-dimensional modelling needs. They needed a solution that could accommodate their detailed modeling requirements, improve the accuracy of their forecasts, and enable them to share insights more efficiently and frequently.

Branch, a company with a finance team playing a crucial role in their country-wide expansion plans, was struggling with the limitations of spreadsheet-based planning. The team was dealing with complex multi-dimensional modelling due to four product offerings, an expansion from 5 to 50 states, and a need to plan by product, geography, and acquisition channel. The limitations of Excel, including lack of model flexibility, increased workbook loading times, and endless manual transformations, slowed the finance team to the point of paralysis. As a venture-backed company, managing cash runway was crucial for Branch. However, constantly changing requirements, broken cell references, and the lack of an audit trail made the team lose confidence in the quality and accuracy of their models. Furthermore, the size and manual nature of each model made communicating results to decision-makers virtually impossible.

The Branch team prioritized finding a flexible and scalable FP&A platform that could accommodate their detailed modeling requirements and better inform insights across the business. They built a series of flexible multi-dimensional models that scale alongside their growth. With models driving revenue, capacity and headcount plans, the finance team is not only better informing business decisions but is also planning with more accuracy, detail and frequency than ever before. These projections are then layered with real-time scenario plans enabling the team to make adjustments depending on region and product performance. The team also built a series of cohort models that allows them to drill down and track the state, product and acquisition channel-level detail. This unlocked the ability to inform the business on customer and product health and make agile changes as needed. By leveraging the views feature in Causal, the finance team created customized views for each team, allowing them to closely track KPIs.

• With the implementation of the new FP&A platform, the Branch finance team is now able to plan in real-time while having higher confidence in their forecast accuracy. The team has reduced the time spent on process management and maximized time spent on providing insights to all levels of the business. They have positioned themselves as extensions of each department as they provide results, insights, and accurate forecasts that are baked in reality and data. This data and insight-driven culture has permeated across the business as department heads and executives can now track performance on a daily basis.

• 5 days saved per month on financial close and reporting processes

• Improved growth forecast accuracy by 70%

• Real-time insights shared to executive team and all 20 department leaders