Apollo Therapeutics Implements Planful in Under 2 Months To Scale Finance

Apollo Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company with a growing portfolio of innovative new medicines. With operations in the UK and the US, the company translates scientific breakthroughs into treatments for serious diseases.

Founded in 2016, Apollo has expanded rapidly over the past few years, while keeping its finance and accounting teams lean. Now, with Planful, those teams have the structure, speed, and flexibility to support the business with confidence and clarity.

Apollo manages more than 20 research programs in its growing portfolio, with up to 600 current and future activities in play at any one time. For a lean finance and accounting team, that level of complexity quickly became too much to manage with spreadsheets, especially as the company scaled.

“We had a clunky Excel workbook for consolidations and a clunkier workbook for forecasting,” recalled Gary Collins, Apollo’s VP of Finance. “We need agility to plan, run scenarios, and look at different cost profiles depending on which programs progress. The ability to do that in an Excel model was just too risky.”

Apollo’s top priority was to establish a reliable foundation for multicurrency close and consolidation. It needed accurate, trusted actuals to serve as the basis for planning. At the same time, the team required flexibility to manage program expenses, workforce expansion, annual plans, monthly reforecasts, and ad hoc scenarios — all while collaborating closely with leaders across the business.

“We didn’t want operating expenditure to just be Finance producing the numbers,” said Gary. “We wanted business teams to input their own data and take ownership of their areas.”

Apollo chose Planful to establish a strong foundation for multicurrency close and consolidation, as well as to support broader planning needs as the business grew in size and complexity.

“Certain solutions felt like you needed a team of engineers to understand them,” said Gary. “Planful was so intuitive — we could get up and running very quickly, even with ERP integrations.”

Planful stood out in Apollo’s evaluation process for its:

• Ease of use for both Finance and business users
• Multicurrency close and consolidation capabilities
• Scalable planning structure to handle growing complexity
• Collaborative workflows through tools like Planful Budget Manager Experience

Planful’s integration capabilities also made a big difference. Gary’s team was able to keep their existing ERP in place, eliminating the need for manual data loads.

“With an integration click of the button, I’d have live data in there,” said Gary. “I wasn’t having to worry about the data being out of date — I could just report on it.”

Apollo worked with Verostone, a Planful partner, to achieve a quick, low-friction implementation, going live on Planful in under two months for a fast turnaround that provided Finance with an immediate foundation for consolidation and reporting. The team also used built-in validation tools to streamline reporting and build confidence in the numbers.

After tackling consolidations, Apollo expanded its use of Planful to include:

• Operating expense planning, replicating and refining legacy Excel models
• Workforce planning to track headcount growth and guide quarterly resource planning
• Dynamic planning to model clinical and nonclinical program scenarios
• Budget Manager Experience to engage both department heads and program leads in the planning process
• Spotlight for Microsoft 365 to automate and refresh repeatable reports
• Power BI connector to integrate financial and operational data for richer, real-time analysis

For Apollo’s lean finance team, as well as department heads and program leads across the business, Planful has delivered faster reporting, greater agility, and a shared foundation for decision-making.

“What used to take a couple of hours in Excel is now just a quick refresh in Planful,” said Gary. “Rather than a big rush at the end of each month and quarter, Planful just updates everything with minimal effort, helping us scale in a really efficient way.”

With Planful, Apollo has been able to:

• Cut monthly reporting time from hours to minutes with automated data refreshes
• Move from quarterly to monthly reforecasting with minimal additional headcount
• Enable 20+ department heads and program leads with self-serve reports and forecasts
• Support a 12x increase in headcount with forward-looking workforce planning

Budget managers now run forecasts several years out and plan against upcoming program milestones. The finance team also uses Planful’s Power BI connector and Spotlight for Microsoft 365 to give the business a real-time view of both financial and operational data.

“Manual data downloads and transfers are really time-consuming, and those are the tasks I want to eliminate,” Gary explained. “Planful’s Power BI connector will automate those processes so we can focus on the higher value-add analysis.”

As Apollo’s headcount continues to grow, Planful’s Workforce Planning solution helps finance and people teams align hiring decisions with strategic priorities.

“After program costs, headcount is the other major cost-driver for the business, so we want to be sure we’re deploying capital in the right places,” Gary explained. “Planful’s workforce solution gives us that forward visibility to see who we’re hiring, the decisions we need to make, and the capabilities we need.”

Planful provided the foundation for Apollo’s future by giving the finance team ownership of a single source of truth, critical for transparent collaboration and increased investor trust.

“Planful gives me confidence in the numbers without the risk that someone copied actuals or other data incorrectly,” Gary said. “A benefit and curse of being in a fast-growing company is that you never know what’s next. Now we have the agility and flexibility we need to deal with whatever happens. I’m confident in Planful and that it can scale alongside our business.”