The Lead Group Gets Financial Insights 80% Faster With Planful

What happens when your entire finance function hinges on a single spreadsheet—and the person who built it walks out the door?

The Lead Group is a growing online marketing and lead generation firm headquartered in Leawood, Kansas. As the company grew in size and complexity, so did the single spreadsheet holding its core financial processes. Shifts in leadership turned that single spreadsheet into a major risk, exposing a fragile foundation. Unwilling to take any more chances, The Lead Group tapped Planful as the new foundation on which to rebuild its financial and workforce planning processes with greater structure, confidence, and transparency.

When The Lead Group’s CFO departed, years of institutional knowledge were locked away in a file the CFO owned, but that the rest of Finance and Accounting didn’t fully understand. With no choice but to start from scratch, they urgently needed a solution.

“We had to reset and start over from the most basic levels,” said Ben Thomas, the company’s financial controller. “The most important thing for us is historical data for comparing current statements against prior years, but that’s a lot of information. We really needed something better than Excel.”

Ben wanted an intuitive interface, seamless integrations with back-office tools, ample power to analyze huge volumes of historical data, and the flexibility to continue using Excel for ad hoc reporting and analysis. He also had an eye on value, and didn’t want to get locked into paying for features the company would never use.

The Lead Group evaluated several solutions, but Planful stood out from the competition with its intuitive user experience, modular platform, and built-in collaboration capabilities.

Planful also offered a quick, scalable way to modernize its finance and accounting teams without significantly increasing headcount, which delivered even as the business more than doubled in size.

“Planful was really easy from the beginning,” said Ben. “We started with workforce planning, since labor is about 50% of our total costs. Then we moved to OPEX for various departments, built out our structured planning, and started using Planful Spotlight. Once we had all of our costs and revenues in Planful, we could create our P&Ls and forecasts easily.”

Planful enabled the lean finance team to bring structure and automation to every process—from budgeting to reporting—without adding headcount. The platform also unified data across departments, providing the clarity, accuracy, and confidence the company needed while Ben and his team gained actionable insights they could easily share with department heads, executives, and investors.

“Once we got Planful, we just created efficiency after efficiency after efficiency,” Ben added. “I can answer questions a lot more quickly and easily than before. And, when new questions come up, we don’t have to build a new spreadsheet every time. Planful lets us keep building on what we’ve already created.”

With Planful, The Lead Group rebuilt and transformed its finance operations, giving decision-makers consistent, on-demand access to reliable data and trusted insights.

Ben summed up the benefits in three key areas:

• Speed: “Before Planful, everything took a lot more time, and we only got 20% of the information we needed. Now, we’re getting 100% of the information in about 20% of the time it used to take.”
• Clarity: “After we close, we quickly generate the presentations and reports we need to share. We couldn’t even do it before Planful, so it’s been a big improvement.”
• Confidence: “We went from no visibility to complete visibility with Planful. When someone asks for a forecast, it’s already built. We don’t have to recreate things every time something changes or new information arrives.”

Planful also removed the risk of a single point of failure. Processes are now documented, repeatable, and scalable, allowing The Lead Group to run financial planning, workforce planning, budgeting, and forecasting on a solid, sustainable foundation.

“Planful let us create something where anyone can walk in and learn the process,” Ben said. “If someone needs an answer, they can get it themselves without me getting involved. We weren’t doing most of this before, so Planful has become a key piece of our growth because we’re getting more visibility into areas we couldn’t previously. It’s just been huge.”