Wdesk for Board of Directors Reporting

Situation:

• Joe's company was using Microsoft® PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and occasionally, PDFs, to create its monthly board report.
• 10 to 15 people spread across the globe worked on the report each month.
• Joe spent a significant amount of time formatting, paginating, and updating numbers every month for each report.
• Because many of the tables and charts were images, updating numbers was difficult and time-consuming.

How Joe uses Wdesk:

• Joe's team creates reports for the board of directors that include P&L, financial projections, sales trends, balance sheet, and other macroeconomic information.
• The FP&A team manages its entire monthly board report process in Wdesk, so numbers in charts and tables are linked, and formatting is consistent.
• Because the report has already been built, Joe and five to six other core contributors roll forward the report each month. They work through the documents to update linked data and other information without having to make wholesale changes to the document or build the report from scratch each time.
• Collaboration is facilitated in Wdesk using the direct comment feature. Team members comment directly to one another, referencing a specific number or location within the document. Email notifications alert users when new comments are made.
• The team uses Binders to consolidate all the documents for the board report, creating tabs for documents from specific geographic regions.
• Once the report is finished in Wdesk, it is saved as a PDF and distributed to stakeholders.

The team's results:

• Wdesk has decreased the amount of time it takes the team to compile each report by at least 80%, cutting a day off the process each month.
• Because data is linked, Joe needs only to resync updated data to Wdesk, and all changes flow through the board report.
• The consistency and accuracy of the company's board report have improved with Wdesk.
• The ability to review and collaboration on the report in real time has made Joe and his team's lives easier and allowed them to spend more time on value-added work.