Ubiquity Boosts Financial Clarity to Drive EBITDA Growth With Planful

Ubiquity is a fast-growing telecommunications startup. From its inception, like most startups, it used spreadsheets to track, model, and collaborate on budgets, financial plans, and reports.

But, as growth surged and its business became increasingly complex, spreadsheet-driven processes muddied access to dependable financial insights. Once Ubiquity switched to Planful, the path to better, more accurate financial success became crystal clear.

Ubiquity is a digital infrastructure owner, developer, and operator. Its open-access fiber platform is the largest and fastest-growing of its type in the United States. The company partners with ISPs, wireless carriers, utilities, and municipalities to deliver connectivity and sustainability solutions in underserved communities.
And, as with most startups, it quickly outgrew spreadsheet-driven processes.

“We were fairly unstructured and just focused on growth,” recalled Ubiquity’s FP&A Manager Paul Farrar. “But, with Excel, we couldn’t get detailed financial reports, didn’t have strong visuals, and couldn’t hold people accountable to their financial performance goals.”

Paul explained how Ubiquity relied on extensive and overly complex spreadsheets filled with complex models and hundreds of financial assumptions. Excruciatingly slow file opening times, frequent crashes, manual errors, and other frustrations common to spreadsheets pushed Ubiquity to search for a more reliable, modern solution.

“We had the most complex, elaborate Excel model I’d ever worked with,” Paul added. “But, worse yet, it neither gave us the granularity or top-level visibility we needed to understand our performance or see where we were or weren’t doing well.”

Ubiquity evaluated several potential options and, working with Bakerfield Solutions, chose Planful as its new foundation for financial performance management. Planful’s extensive library of data connectors was a key driver of Ubiquity’s decision.

“We had NetSuite data in Planful before our first meeting with Bakerfield Solutions was over, and accessing those actuals was crucial,” said Paul. “It took about two hours to integrate. Bakerfield was phenomenal!”

From there, Ubiquity built financial models using 15 critical variables and used Planful’s budget templates to compare budget versus actuals, conduct pressure tests, and more.

“We really liked Planful’s modeling tools out of the gate,” Paul added. “Once you create one or two, you wonder why you’d ever do it in Excel again. It was that fast to start building templates and gaining the visibility that we didn’t have before Planful.”

With its newfound financial visibility, Ubiquity quickly delivered more detailed and accurate information to executives and budget owners. Once Ubiquity’s decision-makers saw those insights, their eyes were opened to new growth and improvement opportunities.

“They learned so much more about their budgets, although some of it was bad news initially,” Paul explained. “But once they started working in Planful and building their budgets, that visibility — good or bad — drove the right behaviors.”

Paul worked to bring more departments onto the Planful platform. Leaders in Sales and Marketing were early adopters, as was Ubiquity’s CEO. From there, more budget owners and business leaders relied on Planful to determine the right moves and continue the company’s explosive growth.

Paul added, “Planful brought more structure to the business. It helped us map departments and accounts correctly and drive business across nearly 20 departments. We couldn’t even do regional views with Excel or cut it by subsidiary. Now, we can just focus on the business.”

Paul continued listing the value Planful has helped drive for Ubiquity, including:

• $300,000 in cost avoidance: Paul estimates Planful removed so much manual effort from budgeting, modeling, and reporting processes that it avoided adding two new full-time workers in FP&A. “Removing ourselves from the process saved us a lot of manual work and added a lot of productivity,” said Paul.
• 100s of hours cut from reporting cycles: Once Ubiquity closes the books, reports are published through Planful in two hours. From there, Accounting runs the variance analysis, and by the 15th day of the cycle, they’re presenting to the executive team. “It used to take hundreds of hours; now it’s two, and everyone gets their reports — it’s amazing,” said Paul.
• Growth through visibility: Paul said Ubiquity had its “best EBITDA in a year” since deploying Planful. He attributed that success to better insights delivered via Planful reports and the company’s first-ever bottom-up budget, including actuals and budget numbers.
• Double the financial accuracy: Ubiquity saw budget accuracy increase two-fold. “Even with increased complexity and revenue growth for the business, we’re two times more accurate using Planful, at least,” Paul said.
• Finance-owned solution: Paul pointed to Planful’s ease of use and Bakerfield’s expertise in delivering a mostly autonomous solution. He estimates his total Planful administration time to be just two hours per month.

Paul recommends that any organization looking to improve financial performance management with a modern solution first connect with a trusted partner. Leverage that partner’s expertise to build skills and capabilities you can maintain in-house.

“We did it with Bakerfield,” said Paul. “Get a couple of your people embedded with them, and turn them into super-users fully immersed with the partner. You can’t rely on a third party forever, so get that in-house expertise.”

Paul also added that it’s a good practice to encourage teams to quickly move to Planful rather than slowly transition.

“We forced our teams to get into the weeds, from the CFO down. Make it your job to find the productivity gains. I took the time to get people on Planful, and now I will have such an easy job this year.”

Those productivity gains have some personal benefits for Paul, too: “My colleagues ask me for data, and they think it’s going to take me 10 or 20 hours to deliver it. I use Planful, and I’m done in one hour. That’s more time for me to play golf!”

More time to work on his handicap isn’t Paul’s only motivation for using Planful. He’s still waging a battle against spreadsheet-driven inefficiencies: “Success to me will be when we’ve 100% eliminated Excel from our budgeting models.”