The Challenge: Manual Data Entry, Version Control and Report Generation 

As Petfolk rapidly expanded, and with plans to open more locations by year’s end, their financial processes were struggling to keep up. Vinesh Patel, Petfolk’s Senior Director of Finance and a one-person finance team found himself spending countless hours on manual data entry, version control, and report generation.

Patel explains: “Our P&L reporting required me to go into my accounting software, extract all the transactions, copy and paste into Excel workbooks, review and analyze P&Ls, only to realize another transaction has been posted and I had to do it all over again.”

He adds, “I quickly realized we couldn’t manage P&Ls through Excel with our growth plans and needed a platform to manage at scale”

Vinesh Patel
Senior Director of Finance

The Solution: an FP&A solution that led to pawsitive growth, time-saving and automated reporting

With a team of just 3 people in Finance and Accounting together, Patel uses Datarails to connect with their accounting, operations, and payroll systems to automate reporting processes, create dashboards for stakeholders, and free up time for deeper analysis. 

“What used to take me hours is now just a few seconds as all I have to do is press a few refresh buttons to generate all of my reporting, analysis, and presentations”

Vinesh Patel
Senior Director of Finance

“We wouldn’t be able to get to where we are today supporting 16 clinics with such a lean team without Datarails,” Vinesh adds. “It’s done a lot of the automation and reporting for me.”

“Without Datarails, I would need at least one more analyst, if not two, to handle the workload.”

Vinesh Patel
Senior Director of Finance

Enhanced visibility, dashboards, and analysis

With their operational data synced in Datarails, he can create dashboards that are location-specific for every Practice Manager and Partner Doctor. 

It’s as simple as flipping the filter and sending it to the respective manager. This gives him and the stakeholders visibility into data like daily revenue, appointments, and shifts per location and gets into more granular insights such as, revenue by doctor by shift, and per appointment. 

“With Datarails. I’m free to carve out and really be thoughtful of what the presentation of the numbers should look like.”

Vinesh Patel
Senior Director of Finance

More bandwidth to do analysis, another powerful benefit for Petfolk

With their process being so manual and time-consuming before Datarails, the team did not have the bandwidth and time to do any deep analysis. 

After uploading their payroll data into Datarails, they use dashboards and analyses to show all of their payroll and headcount data, Vinesh describes as a “huge unlock” for Petfolk. 

Datarails’ Lookup tables: a feature favorite 

Datarails allowed Patel to link his different systems with the lookup tables. Allowing him to slice and dice the data differently, adding additional attributes to the financial data. 

This led him to be able to see data across multiple data sources for each location: when a specific location opened, its tenure, monthly P&Ls, detailed headcount roster, appointments and utilization %, etc.

One of the main highlights for Vinesh: “I don’t have to work 24 hours, to get this all done.”