Comfy, a Siemens company, connects people, places, and systems through one intuitive workplace app, resulting in great relationships between people and their workplaces.
Comfy is a workplace intelligence app that was acquired by Siemens in 2018. The Siemens company connects people, places, and systems through one intuitive workplace app, resulting in great relationships between people and their workplaces.
Comfy is on a mission to create amazing workplace experiences for everyone—from the people who operate the building to the people who fill it. Comfy connects people, places, and systems through one intuitive workplace app, thereby creating great relationships between people and their workplaces.
Difficulties
The finance team at Comfy had a few challenges they were trying to solve. Firstly, they needed support in creating monthly reports as well as improving budget and forecast processes. Second, they were looking to save time while ensuring data integrity and improving forecast accuracy. They also wanted to blend data from various sources into reports- data from their ERP system, CRM (Salesforce) and revenue recognition platform (Zuora).
The team was conducting a lot of manual copy/paste transfers and quality checks of data to ensure that the numbers match the data in their systems.
Solution
Jens Stottman, CFO of Comfy, looked towards Datarails to help address his challenges. With Datarails, he can now download actuals out of his system and directly upload them to Datarails, which eliminates the time consuming manual monthly data input process he used to conduct.
Stottman uses Datarails frequently for closing data quality checks before submitting data to the corporate level. This way, he can often check the accuracy of numbers in little to no time. He also relies on Datarails for the quick creation of standardized reports.
Stottman sites the drill-down lists as his favorite feature within the Datarails system. He explains that in his Excel spreadsheets, he used to have to manually copy/paste data into Excel spreadsheets to get to the underlying data. Now, all he has to do is highlight a line or full column where he thinks there are variances, and then go to the drill down list option. This feature points out the data that is behind each cell and presents it in an easily digestible way. “I couldn’t do that before with my manually created spreadsheets,” Stottman says. “To me it’s a big time-saver and gives me quick insights into what happened in different cells in different periods.”
“Datarails gives me quick insights into what happened in different spreadsheet cells in different periods.”
Outcome
The team at Comfy consistently runs quality checks, and drills into booking data a couple of times towards the end of each month with Datarails to see if they booked the data correctly, and if journal entries in QuickBooks make sense.
Stottman states that with Datarails, the finance team at Comfy saves anywhere between two to five full working days per month, which they now devote to other tasks like high level analysis.
“With Datarails, we save anywhere between two to five full working days per month. Amazing!”
Overall, data is now better organized, and it’s easy to compare different versions of forecasts and budgets to understand the development- which before took a lot of time to do because the data was in different systems (for example in the corporate consolidation system, local systems, and on Excel). Now, everything is easily accessible in one place.
To this day, Stottman is amazed that he can throw into the Datarails system whatever existing Excel file he has and use it as an input file to generate reports. “Oftentimes you read about advertised product capabilities online while in reality they’re very different. But with Datarails, that’s not the case,” says Stottman. “I can provide whatever data source I have and work it into established data collection and reporting processes. That was really the biggest surprise to me – that not just data dumps out of systems (structured data from systems) but also all kinds of Excel spreadsheets, however they are structured, can work with Datarails.”
“The biggest surprise to me- that not just structured data from systems, but also all kinds of Excel spreadsheets, however they are structured, can work with Datarails.”