Bakerfield Solutions: Dynamically Planning Revenue by Moving From Excel to the Cloud | Derek Milioni, Thomas Headrick, Eric Jue

Speaker 1: I am a product marketing manager here at, and I'm just super excited for us all to be here. Also, we're going to have a lot of fun tonight. Am I right? Are we excited? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, let me just introduce you right away to our Bakerfield Solutions team. This is Derek. This is Thomas, and we're going to be joined by Eric later. But yeah, let's get started. Give them a round of applause.

Derek Milioni: All right. All right, everybody. So what we want to do is we're trying to be the longest title of perform. So that's what we tried to achieve today. No, I'm kidding. What we want to do is talk about how we're going to be able to take what you're doing in Excel today and transform it into a better together solution. But before we jump into that, I just want to see, I mean, how many of you guys are using dynamic planning today? Can I get a show of hands? That is fantastic. I love that. All right. For those of you who didn't raise your hands, maybe how many of you have seen dynamic planning this week? Awesome. So you got some ideas rolling, right? And now, how many of you, whether or not you're using dynamic planning at all, still have that Excel workbook at home that drives you crazy. We all know that one we're talking about, right? The one that you pull up once a day, once a week, once a month, and it just stares at you. So that's what we're going to be trying to conquer today. But before we jump into that, let's talk about who we are. So I'm Derek Milioni. Technical account manager here at Bakerfield Solutions. I do all of our technical demos. And with me, I've got Thomas Headrick who is our day, in day out, go- to guy when our clients have this workbook that they're trying to figure out. How do I automate? How do I make this into a true solution? They bring it to him, and he designs that solution in Planful. And so we're going to work together because it's truly better together this week to design that. And now let's talk about who we are at Bakerfield. So Bakerfield Solutions has been working with accounting and finance since 2006, but we were given the fantastic pleasure of starting to work with Planful in 2013. Since then, we've been able to achieve a lot of things, 150 plus clients, 275 plus Planful projects, all of that, trying to bring you the highest quality, which is what led us to be Customer Success Partner of the Year. And every one of us that works at Bakerfield comes with real experience in the finance background. We are not super IT- heavy and technical geniuses. No, I'm an accounting guy. He's a business guy. We both worked in the FP& A space before joining Bakerfield. And so we want to translate that to you today. But let's get to the real meat of what we want to talk about. Where are we going to tackle today? So you have that Excel workbook in your mind, right? That one that you're trying to tackle, trying to figure out a better solution to. What we want to do is take a look at what a workbook would look like specifically focused on revenue and design the optimal solution. We believe that to be dynamic planning. From there, we're actually going to do something fun. We're going to build it out together live. So instead of showing you the end result, we're actually going to walk with you every step of the way, highlighting how easy it is to have that transformative process. So when we think about that, what I want to do, instead of being Bakerfield Solutions, the Planful consulting company, I want to have a little bit more fun. We are going to be Bakerfield brewing company because that's truly my dream, to drink coffee. And so that's what we're going to be today. So we're going to be in that lens of a company that produces what I believe to be one of the best products in the world, coffee. And so we're going to have cold brews, Americanos, lattes. We're going to have these different products. And we're going to talk about some of the challenges that come in with something as simple as adding a new product, a new customer, a new vendor, right? Those things that cause a lot of heartache in our daily revenue plans. From there, we're going to talk about how we're forecasting, right? So when we talk about planning, I'm sure there's a lot of different words that come to your mind, budgets, forecast, three plus nine, four plus eight, all numbers that end up in 12 to 13 because as finance people, we don't go too high. So we're going to look at a three plus nine forecast. And we're going to talk about how it is easier to manage that in Planful with the focus specifically being on revenue, two drivers, price and quantity, together combined to create that financial data in revenue. And then we're going to talk about where we're at today, right? That's the theme. We're starting in an offline Excel and transforming it to a Planful solution, to a true cloud solution. And so that's where we're going to be heading today. So that is our company. So we talked about where we're starting. And we want to talk about many of the challenges that our clients are bringing to us and how we're overcoming them. And so as we talk about Excel, imagine right, you've got your different technologies, your ERP systems, your inventory management systems, all great online flexible technologies that you've clearly invested a lot of money into because you believe it's the future of where you want to be. The minute that you're extracting out into that Excel, it's static. It is no longer connected to that technology. It's good data but only for that specific point in time. It's not connected to both the source, but it's also not connected to the rest of your FP& A team. It's only living on your monitor, or for my case, the double triple monitor, but it's only living on that monitor and in that specific cell. And that creates a lot of friction when you're trying to evolve the way you're planning. What it's going to force you to do is go through the timing variances, going through the version control, all of which create an experience from a technological standpoint that translates into a maintenance heavy and time- consuming product for your end users. And so when we think about that, we think about all of the things that we're dealing with. I mean, how many of you guys are dealing with that today? Yeah. I got of a couple hands. All right, we'll get you some more coffee. Bakerfield brew and we'll supply you guys. It leads to that frustration. It's truly not better together and it's truly not... And I'm sure all of you guys have experienced these amazing products and features and functionality that you've seen in Planful. Not just in dynamic planning, but when you extract it into that offline workbook, you don't get access to any of that. And so what we want to do is flip that. We want to move away from that lack of collaboration and analysis, and we want to focus on the solution. And so we're looking at that solution. The first question we have to ask is why dynamic planning? And the reason why we believe it's dynamic planning is because how many of you guys saw something outside of this session today that you really liked? Yeah. If you didn't raise your hand, we'll talk about refunds. Planful will deal with that. So when you connect it to Planful, you're getting those features. That revenue model is going to have that feature functionality. You're connected to the cloud. And when you're leveraging that cloud data, it truly is better together. You're collaborating in real time. And so we're going to be looking at that here live, but we want to address why dynamic planning. So we're reducing the maintenance. We're leveraging all of that feature functionality that you guys have seen, that you're excited about to implement into your application. And we're doing that with that workbook. We're transforming it into Planful to leverage all of those cool feature functionality. And all of that leads to truly enhanced planning and analysis. It's a better together experience, allowing us to be able to compare multiple scenarios and sources instantly. And when I say scenarios, think forecast and budget, flipping between the three plus nine to the four plus eight instantly. You're being able to connect to everything that you're doing in your planning process. You're able to analyze the non- financial data. So we're going to be talking about in a second quantity and price. Because remember, for our coffee business, that's that non- financial data that's going to translate into our revenue numbers. And you're able to collaborate in real time. So we're going to have two teams basically of our FP& A end users for our company, one out of US and one on a Canada. And we're going to talk about what it would look like as an international coffee mogul to work together. Not just one user trying to manage this multi tab workbook but instead, we're working together as a team. It's the theme of this week. So what we want to do now is Thomas is actually going to pull up our starting workbook. And if you remember in the agenda, we have the ability to analyze our starting place. So many of our clients when they're coming in and they're trying to figure out what they're doing today. We're going to look at that workbook and we're going to piece it together, right? What are your drivers price and quantity? What's your company. It's a coffee- focused company. We've got the iced coffee, the Americano. And so we're going to be looking at that and detailing it. But Thomas can say it much better than I can. So Thomas, take it away.

Thomas Headrick: Thank you, Derek. Yeah. So what we have here is a typical offline Excel workbook multitab, multiple different data sources coming into it. And generally, this is something we would see in like design session number one. When we sit down with our clients, we say," Hey, what do you got?" And because our end goal is to make it look as familiar as possible, but make the process frictionless. So what we have here on the first tab is a summary. Generally, a C- suite type exec may want to see this on a monthly basis. They want to be able to come in here, hit refresh on their data and see where we're at. The next tab is a quantity export. This may be pretty typical for like a inventory management software to export out by skewing product. And we can see quantity for historicals. Next up, we have a price export and this is where all our prices are set for the previous year in historical actuals and the forecast what we're looking at for the rest of 2022. The budget input, this is something where the collaboration really becomes kind of just a time- consuming process because one user may have a certain group of products, and they're getting emailed this workbook. They're inputting it into the yellow tabs there. And then they're sending it to the next person who's going to come in and hit save all for just this one summary tab to be created on a monthly basis.

Derek Milioni: So how many of you guys can relate to this workbook, right? I mean, yeah. How many of you guys are taking one of those tabs, inputting it and emailing it to someone else on your team? Yeah, I see a lot of head nods. So what we want to do is we want to talk about the solution now. So we've got our summary tab, our two quantity and price like data extracts. And we've got that budgeting where we're actually doing the forecasting. So we've got multiple people here within your company. They're going to be excited about this workbook. The summarized high- level detail, the raw extract, the forecasting that bridges the two. So we need to talk about how do we get there? What does Planful do in this process? And we've got a few different pieces. First, we want to start off if we think about our different pieces, right, the raw data, how we're in manipulating that data, right? How we're forecasting off of it into the future. And then how we're analyzing at the end. We generally want to start off focusing on the raw data. And we do that by leveraging a tool called external source models. So what I'm going to have Thomas do is explain what an external source model is and talk about some of the use cases with it.

Thomas Headrick: Sure. Thank you, Derek. So the external source model is our first tool for getting data into Planful. Typically, it's a table that you can also leverage formulas to get your data loaded. As you can see at the bottom from the screenshot, this looks very similar to our quantity export from our inventory management system. So we want to set up a set template for users to be able to click and drag that information into Planful and be available in our model.

Derek Milioni: So we're going to be building this out live right after this. So it's really exciting. So we talked about external source models. So we're going to be using that for our quantity tab. What about price? What are we going to be doing for price?

Thomas Headrick: So for price, we're going to leverage what we call an analyze view. This is going to be on the face of our model, and users will be able to come in and interface directly with the model as prices changed within your forecast.

Derek Milioni: So a ton of flexibility. Then we'll talk about why that's important for our new product we're adding into our business, iced coffee, because summer in Vegas, we all need ice... All right. So we talked about our data. So that's the bottom, right? Now we want to talk about how are we going to be reporting and forecasting off that data as well as summarizing that data. So what's the solution for that?

Thomas Headrick: Sure. So within models, we have a couple of different options as far as reports go. Today, we're going to be covering cascade reports and a summary report. A cascade report's going to allow us to group by product and skew and look at it from a like filter view. So in this case, it's going to be by company. We'll get those products grouped. Typically for clients, we see a lot of our clients use vendor, customer, filters like this.

Derek Milioni: Yeah. And then we've got our summary report, correct?

Thomas Headrick: Yes. Yeah. Our summary report is going to be very similar to the C- suite level exec summary report that was in the offline workbook. And we're going to show how you guys can update that manually with the click of a button.

Derek Milioni: So PowerPoints are pretty cool, but who's ready to see him actually build this out live and talk through it, right? Yeah. All right. So let's get to building. So what Thomas is going to do, again, we're going to start with our starting point. So as he brings up our original Excel. He's going to talk through bringing those pieces, right? So the quantity and the external source model, the price in our analyzed view, how we add a new product or how we're forecasting and viewing it in a summary. So Thomas, from here, you've got... Bakerfield brewing company has brought you our coffee needs for revenue. You've seen our Excel workbook that we're doing today. How do we transform this into a Planful solution?

Thomas Headrick: Sure. So the first thing we're going to look at here, Derek, is the quantity export, and we want to get that into our system. So like I said, I've looked at columns A through Q, and we need to create a table for us to load to. So when I go back here as you can see, if you look at the top right there is SpotlightXL. This is the Planful integration add- in for Excel. And it allows me to come in here and connect directly to Planful and interface with it. Similar to what Grant was talking about yesterday in the keynote. He mentioned how Excel's a great tool, but we want to be able to leverage it still because a lot of our users are still really familiar with Excel.

Derek Milioni: So it's a seamless transition, right, for your company where we're naturally taking what you're doing today in Excel and slowly bringing in that feature functionality of the cloud without drastically losing the things that you love about Excel. If you have specific formulas, views, formatting, you're not sacrificing that as a cloud solution, we're enhancing it. And so that's what that Spotlight add- on allows us to do. All right. So we've got our ESM here. So explain what we're looking at.

Thomas Headrick: Sure. I've gone ahead and copy pasted the data from the quantity export tab and the offline workbook into this ESM ready to be loaded. And as you can see, all the columns are the same. So I've copy- pasted this data in, and then I just come up here and hit load data. And now it's directly inside of our model now.

Derek Milioni: All right. And we'll see if any of you guys were really paying attention to those columns. We've got one additional column here called company that wasn't on our original. So why is that here and what is it doing?

Thomas Headrick: Sure. So company is actually a lookup formula that we've built into our ESM. So when I come up here and hit refresh, it's going to look at skew and product and return the associated company with it. This is one of many formulas that we can build into ESMs and really help save users time. So if you export from your inventory management system and you have five or six manual manipulations you have to make every time, we're going to look to see if we can integrate that into the ESM, so you're not having to do that manual work yourself.

Derek Milioni: So how many of you guys... I know we saw a bunch of hands of people who have Excel workbooks. There are other offline workbooks or tools are using today. How many of you are taking that extract data and forming like INDEX MATCH, VLOOKUP, PivotTable sums. I mean, how many of you guys are having to do that every single time? Yeah. I get that pain. I spent most of my career in FP& A in the corporate finance world. And it was like," What do I do on Monday mornings? I extract and I manually manipulate the data." I don't think until 2: 00. That's when I get to turn my brain on. No, I'm going through those motions of manipulating data. And that's what our clients are going through. We want to alleviate that. And so that's what ESMs allow us to do. We're automating the things that you don't enjoy about that FP& A process to allow you to have more time to collaborate, communicate, and add in that feature functionality that you saw this week that you were excited about. So we've got this data here. And again, all he did was take that original workbook and copy it and paste it in into external source model. So then what do we do with it? How do we get that to be truly connected to our plan for application?

Thomas Headrick: Sure. So what we're going to do next is go look at cascade report, which is where we're going to view our quantity data by product and skew. As you can see here, it's grouped by product and skew going down as well as across the columns. We have a history section here for 2021 data that we can collapse. And then we have our planning area over here to the right. Now, multiple users can be in this at one time. So you're not having to send this back and forth. And up here, we have the company groupings. So if there's a US one user, all they have to do is come in here, select US one. And then as you can see, it's eliminated all the product skew combinations that were there for Canada as well.

Derek Milioni: So when you're offline and you're extracting these things out of those different applications, right, your ERP, inventory management, Salesforce, whatever it is, every time you're doing those extracts, that's where those PivotTables, the filters... You're having to reset those every single time. What a cascade allows us to do is remove that friction. And it allows us to only show from a collaborative experience the products, the customers, the vendors that we're planning revenue for that are applicable to me and to you. So if we've got... So we've got two different areas of our brewing company. We want to be worldwide, but right now, we're focused on north America. So we've got US, we've got Canada, right? And if I'm US team and I'm coming in here, those products are applicable to me. At any point, I switch to Canada, then it's going to be new products focused specifically on Canada. And so that's going to save you time because you don't have to have the Canadian extract, the US extract, the India extract, the Mia extract. No. You have one version all able to be accessible at the same time, and all you have to do is plug in those numbers, hit save, and you're good to go. So let's do some planning, Thomas. So if we want to plan out some quantity for our product, how do we do so?

Thomas Headrick: Sure. So if we look here at cold brew, I'm just going to continue the trend. Let's go to 160 here. And you're able to actually copy and paste. So you get the same Excel functionality you normally would have. And you can just come here and copy and paste it. Soon as it's entered, you'll see the yellow highlighting is denoting what we've changed, and we're going to hit save data.

Derek Milioni: So it's easy as that. So you can do Excel shortcuts. You can leverage direct inputs, formulas. It's what you love about Excel, but that's now saved to our plan for application. My dashboards, my reports, all those things you saw this week are now going to have those data points in it. So we've done some quantity input. We've got that from our external source model. How are we handling price?

Thomas Headrick: Sure. So price is going to be handled in a analyzed view. We have the price input here. So as you can see, this is the exact same table that we were looking at within the offline workbook. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come here, and I'm just going to copy paste what we see. And I'm move it into what we have here. Works very similar. Oh sorry. Works very similar to what we were doing in the cascade report. It's going to highlight yellow. And as soon as I hit save data, that's going to be loaded directly into our model.

Derek Milioni: So price allows us to just seamlessly drag that into that analyzed view. We're good to go. At any point we want to modify those numbers, we can do so, and it's going to use that quantity and price to create revenue. So now let's talk about... We wanted to add in a new product, iced coffee. So if we've got quantity in our ESM, we've got an analyzed view for price, how are we handling coffee? Because it wasn't included in that ESM.

Thomas Headrick: Sure. So new product input is a really big issue for clients. And it's like," How do we get this in? We got to add new rows. It's going to break our formatting. All our VLOOKUPS are going to break. How do we handle this?" So what we have here is a product quantity input. You can see iced coffee is going to be at us one and it has its own skew. So I'm going to come in here and I'm just going to say... Let's say we're planning eight, just copy paste it. And I hit save data. And now that is the new quantity is in our model. And if I go back to this cascade report, you can see iced coffee doesn't exist here yet. But as soon as I hit refresh, users can come in here. And if they don't like what I've planned at the eight, they're able to change that, and it's going to save into the model.

Derek Milioni: So how many of you guys are able to do that today, right? How many of you guys are able to have someone from your team add a new product, a new customer, new vendor, and it's already formatted into your reports that others are planning off of? How many of you guys want to be able to do that? Perfect. So that's what cascades allow us to do. And again, remember, if I tag iced coffee to US, I can have different skews to Canada. They're only going to show up to what's relevant. Same thing with customer product combinations by vendor. So it's all seamlessly together. And everything he's doing in this spotlight applications online. None of this is offline right now. So we can access this anywhere in the world for this demonstration. So then how do we add... Can we go back and add in some price for that?

Thomas Headrick: Yes. So if we go back to our price input, we'll notice down here at the bottom, we have iced coffee. It's pretty hot in Vegas. A lot of you probably stayed up late last night. So I'm really going to charge you guys for coffee. So let's go 11. 50.

Derek Milioni: This is why we don't let Thomas actually decide the prices.

Thomas Headrick: They keep me in the back. And then I come here and I hit save data, and that's going to bring this new price input for iced coffee into our model.

Derek Milioni: And what you'll notice right there is as he was inputting in that table, you saw it highlight the new changes. So it's going to visualize what you're doing and understand how you're impacting those numbers. So we've got quantity. We've got price. We've done some forecasting in our cascade. All right. I'm trying to bring this to my upper management and show how our company's doing today. I mean, we are selling iced coffee like crazy. I triple the price. It should be. How do I see that in my summarized view?

Thomas Headrick: Sure. So pardon me. So what we have here is the summer report that we saw in the offline workbook. As you can see, it's zeroed out right now because we didn't have any data in our model when we started. So when I come in here and I hit refresh, we're going to see our actuals populate from Q1 all the way to Q4 and 2022, Q2, three and four don't have data because there's no actuals there. But then the forecast in P through S, we see the forecasted numbers. We just planned that, and we have these visual graphs over here for some KPIs. And then we have variance at the bottom.

Derek Milioni: So what we're noticing is our clients are actually able to take their starting summary reports and start to build in the graphics that they want. They weren't able to do this before because anytime you were creating a new summary report, the amount of time it took to actually get there in no way would manage the KPIs and displays and charts because it's disconnected. And so what you're actually seeing from our clients is when they're able to leverage dynamic planning. They're able to not only replicate what they're doing today but actually take it to the next level and enhance it. Include multiple different summary reports. Include different versions of forecast by product, by plan, by customer because they're spending less time getting there and more time focusing on what they want to do once the information is ready to be forecasted off. So if we want to look at our new product iced coffee and just see how that's doing, how do we do that?

Thomas Headrick: Sure. So up here at the top left, we have a filter. So if we come here and select iced coffee and then hit refresh, we're only going to see iced coffee in our summary report.

Derek Milioni: So what this is allowing us to do is we don't have to create the second version, right? It's like you spend all week creating the presentation for your board. And then next thing you know, they're like," Okay, but I just wanted to see all of the things you did, but for this one product or this one customer." Maybe they just got out of that customer meeting and they're like," Hey, show me everything you just did but in the lens of that customer." If you're doing this in Excel today, that's a headache. You've got to do all of those extracts with a new filter. In Planful, you just go," Okay, here's that customer." Hit refresh. And now your entire presentations in that scope of view. So that's how we're able to take that starting point, right? The summary and the forecast are two extracts of price and quantity and evolve it into a cloud. So as we're closing` our presentation and we're going to lead into a Q& A, I just want to recap where we were and where we're at. So what we were able to do is identify those challenges, that friction, the maintenance intensivity, the time- consuming. One of the big things I noticed in this keynote that Planful was putting on was the lack of user security. Because imagine if that Excel that is your latest and greatest version ends up in the wrong hands or you lose your latest file. You don't have that issue with Planful. Again, you've got all of those SOX compliance stickers that you saw up there. They have real impact. So we identified those current challenges. And when we were able to resolve them by building our revenue model, right? We leverage the ESM, the analyzed view, our two different types of reports. We noticed all of it come to life. And what's amazing about that is at any point, what we were doing as a two- man team, you can do as a 20- man team, 30 group. You can do this where everyone's working together to create that better together experience. And that's how we're using dynamic planning to evolve our forecasting. So at this point, what I want to do is I'm going to bring Eric Jue up here. He is our head of service delivery for Planful on the Bakerfield Solutions side. And we're going to answer your questions about dynamic planning.

Speaker 1: Really quickly, I'm going to be running around with the mic so that we can all hear you.

Derek Milioni: All right. Who's the, who's the brave soul that's going to go first. Yes. You don't have to yell at me.

Speaker 6: Oh, okay. So on one input, you used a report and on another input, you used analyze view.

Derek Milioni: Yep.

Speaker 6: Is there a benefit to one or the other or was that just for presentation purposes? So what was the driving decision between using one instrument for one thing and a different one for the other?

Derek Milioni: Yeah. So that's a fantastic question. So if we look back at how we were trying to design our plan, we had three areas, right? We had the raw data, we had how we were forecasting off of it, and then we had our summary report. And so when we created our new product iced coffee, we did the analyze view because we wanted it to be included in that raw data area because our cascade was set up to only show relevant item that had some type of history attached to it. And so we leveraged an analyze view to be able to create a data point connected to it so that our cascade recognizes," Hey, iced coffee exists." So it's a great starting to use an analyzed viewer, an ESM to get your data into the application, get new products, new customers. And then the reports work as that second step to where it says," Okay, for those that are relevant that have a piece of data connected to it, let's forecast off of it. Let's plan off of it."

Speaker 7: When you copy and pasted from the external data into the Spotlight form, you copy and pasted actual prices on top of that. When you upload, does that override what's in Planful at the time, or does it take from the actual data from those previous months?

Derek Milioni: You guys want to... Let guys jump in?

Eric Jue: I can take that one. So yeah, we can set it up either way. For the demo purposes, we just copied everything into input actuals as well as the forecast numbers. But the actuals can come from any system. Like you have a database that stores all your pricing data. It can pull in from there and load into the system. And then you would just copy and paste the forecast.

Speaker 7: If somebody accidentally upload...

Eric Jue: It would be locked down. So there's locking features. We can lock down by any member and any dimension.

Speaker 7: Thank you.

Eric Jue: Okay.

Derek Milioni: So if you guys think about all of the user security you're leveraging in Planful today, right, the dimension security, the user access, the approval roles, all of that's built into this. So you have all of those checks and balances as you go. Yes. Yeah. Sides, you guys got to start getting some questions. These guys are killing you out here.

Speaker 9: When you had a report up there and when you hit refresh after you added the iced coffee, it just showed up and had a subtotal automatically. How did that happen?

Derek Milioni: Yeah. So that's one of the best features of a cascade report is it's showing you what we call relevant combinations. And so the way our clients are leveraging that. And that's why we use that analyze view to add in iced coffee. So again, that structure is we've got data points that we're leveraging and analyzing an ESM view. That cascade report takes anything that has data in it relevant to it's... For ours was location. So US product combinations, Canada product combinations. So as soon as we entered quantity into our analyzed view, the cascade report, think of it like a PivotTable with a filter, right? As soon as it knows, there's a combination, it's going to include it into the report. The difference here is cascades have way more formatting than something that you're filtering on in Excel today. So it really just automatically knows because of the way we designed it. Take all of our product groupings and have a subtotal below it. And it's really easy to design that. Next question. Thank you sides.

Speaker 11: Okay.

Speaker 10: Hey guys...

Derek Milioni: Of course.

Speaker 10: Essentially, we do all of our forecasting and planning and structured planning. Can this replace that?

Derek Milioni: We like to think of it not as a replacement, but Planful wants everything to truly work better together. So we see areas to where structured planning... One thing I love about structured planning is that workforce planning, that pre- built functionality directly to your workforce. But sometimes, if you need that additional flexibility, here, like you need the cascade, you need to... Instead of be doing things by month, maybe you want to plan across by customers. That's where something like dynamic planning would come in. What we're seeing with our clients who are utilizing what we believe to be their best plan for application is a combination of both. So they have a few items in structured and a few items in dynamic planning.

Speaker 10: So, Eric, does the data go into the system and in the same intersection?

Eric Jue: Yes.

Speaker 10: inaudible go into the system and pull the scenario that I loaded through?

Eric Jue: Correct. It depends on how the data is faded into the models. But yes, they are interconnected, and it would be the same data. Correct. We'll go back to the left side here in a second.

Derek Milioni: It's like the T- shirt cannon when it's not on your side of the stadium, it's just like," Ah."

Speaker 11: Thanks guys. Question for you. Your customers, are you building this for them? And they're really doing the end user input, or is this something that your customers are actually building and maintaining kind of the backend admin structure themselves these days?

Thomas Headrick: So we have a couple different clients in here actually that we're in the process of building these for right now. And I would say we go through the process of designing it with a small group who's going to admin. And we try to teach them like how we built it, how it functions. If any issues pop up, they reach out to us, and then they kind of handle end user training. So what we show would be more end user based, and then whoever's maintaining it, we're going to kind of walk them through like an admin course. Like this is how it functions. These are the friction points that you might run into where you have to edit and troubleshoot. But mostly, it's just a small group that we teach how to do the modeling. Sure.

Speaker 11: Thanks.

Derek Milioni: And this is not supposed to be something that you need IT to come in and manage. Again, we're all finance people here at Bakerfield, and our goal here is at the end of the day, you want to add a new product. You type in the new product you hit save, right? You don't have to go send an IT ticket to see your models change dynamically. So at no point are we going to build something that's unmanageable by an FP& A user. It's designed with finance in mind for finance.

Speaker 12: So you would have to set up... So you can email these spreadsheets, right, to the people who would be able to use them, and they would have to have access to Planful through user admin and all of that in order to update, make those updates for the plan?

Derek Milioni: So this is available both in the browser and that Spotlight add- in. Really no emails required.

Speaker 12: Okay.

Derek Milioni: So as long as you can log into Planful, you just use that same... I don't know if you guys are familiar with the file cabinet like in the more consolidated reporting. But you have the ability to really just click on reports and pick the report that you want to work in, right? Whether it's your forecast, your latest budget, you want to look at actuals. So it's no different than any other area of Planful. As you're logged in, you have the ability to click right into it. That being said, there are options to be a task manager in other areas of application. Assign tasks to users that would be via email.

Speaker 12: Thanks.

Speaker 16: I pulled the file cabinet up too.

Speaker 13: You guys may have answered it with the admin aspect of it, but I saw another section talking about dynamic planning and underneath it, seems like there's things like you have to set it up in a way with like there's key, there's value, doing math and stuff like that. Is this sort of like the back end of what this product is, or is this something completely different, and how do they mesh together?

Derek Milioni: Yeah. And that's a great question. So there are some technical aspects because it is what we call multidimensional data cube, right? So you're trying to figure out how many data points. I loved what Grant was showing where he talked about four X, six X about the amount of data that's coming into Planful. So there are some best practices in regards to how we would work with a client to set up those data points and make sure everything's running as efficiently as possible. That being said, just the reality of it is the setup overall is not... We talk about keys and data points and multidimensional data. It really is just as simple as how do you want to plan, right? So when we look at building this on the back end, it's just, okay, well, we have product, skew, price, quantity. And we just take those dimensions of data as we call them, and we set it up in a way that makes sense to what you're doing today. So from a technological standpoint, it's not really that... You don't have to have a data science degree to understand the build. Does that make sense?

Eric Jue: Does that answer your question?

Speaker 13: In some way, yeah. But I'm just curious, like maybe what's behind the scene a bit.

Eric Jue: Yeah. What we showed was just the end user face. We didn't go into the background and the model build and all that stuff.

Speaker 13: Cool.

Eric Jue: But there is that piece of it.

Speaker 13: Okay.

Speaker 14: So my question was going to be that I didn't see all of your skew level modeling within post to a revenue account, right? What I didn't see was like the revenue account. So I maybe that's maybe more the back end side of things but how does that inaudible...

Eric Jue: Correct. Out model for the demonstration was only had revenue. So it was just one account. But yes, there could be another dimension for account where there could be multiple... You can plan expenses and revenue together.

Speaker 14: Okay. Clear.

Speaker 1: Okay, y'all. We're at time.

Derek Milioni: All right.

Eric Jue: We can follow up with you.

Speaker 1: Well, yeah, if you have more questions because I know you all do, I'm sure they'll be more than happy to answer them. But thank you all so much. Give them a round of applause. Thank you.