Intuitive & Powerful - Helps support a scrappy FP&A team
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Quickbooks Online doesn't have a robust or flexible budget capability, and filling that gap is what led me to Cube. I'm able to fully house budget and forecast scenarios, run reports and analytics, all within Cube. It's easy to shift a couple parameters, hit update, and refesh your report in the same place to run different scenarios. I tend to use it more frequently than the accounting software's built in reports, and now I've extended its capabilities beyond just budgets and into revenue and payroll. We tie all these things together to go beyond budgeting and into forecasting, planning, etc.
Pros
- Intuitive - it acts as an extension of programs you're already familiar with, Excel and Sheets. There's no programming language to learn, no complicated portals to work within. If you don't know BI, you don't need to learn it. You can "Cube-ify" your existing spreadsheets, or build from the ground up. The functionality is similar to the way pivot tables work, so it's intuitive to learn and use.
- Powerful - It wrangles all our different streams of data from different places and you're able to control it with a few clicks from an Excel sidebar
- A huge shout out to the support team as well. I always have a dedicated rep at hand for help (what's up Riley!); the support articles are genuinely useful, which is refreshing for finance software; & they're always looking for product feedback to help adapt the roadmap to what's actually needed.
Cons
- The only flaw that I find is something they've communicated that they're constantly working to improve, which is speed to load or fetch data. It can be time consuming to update and process a bunch of different reports. However, some important caveats: some of the lag is due to the way our company structure is set up; I have been able to re-design/architect my reports/sheets with speed in mind & to make things more efficient, and that's gone a long way; Cube has already improved the speed of fetching noticeably since I first got setup. I expect it will only continue to improve until it's no longer even noticeable.
Return on Investment
- Time saved is a huge one. The budget & budget reporting process has been transformed from manual and tedious tasks to something much more streamlined and efficient
- I'm hoping to use Cube to gain insight into our COGS and job profitability and find some actual $$$ there
Other Software Used
QuickBooks Online, BILL, BILL Spend & Expense
