“We had so many spreadsheets linked to other spreadsheets that it was really hard to manage all the data and make changes flow through the system,” says Aaron Palajac, financial analyst. Getting the input from all the internal business units, formatting it consistently and validating the budget data consumed most of the annual six-month budget process, and by the time it was done some of the information was out of date. Because Calypso has a small finance staff, both the CFO and the Director of Financial Planning and Reporting had to take time away from their more strategic duties to deal with the budget data.

When David Gosnell, director of financial planning & reporting, came on board, he identified the need for a comprehensive planning and reporting tool. Gosnell had experience elsewhere with a large, enterprise-scale financial application, but that would be too expensive for Calypso. Learning that a number of people who had worked at this software company were now at Host Analytics, he began to evaluate its tools. “Our management wants to make sure we get the best value for our dollar,” Palajac says, “and he realized that Host Analytics is much more cost-effective in terms of installation and yearly costs.

Managing intellectual capital

Calypso chose Host Analytics’ Planning Cloud and Reporting Cloud, primarily for theAdvanced Workforce Planning application, a key capability for a company built on its human capital. “Our employees are our capital,” Palajac explains. “The majority of our costs are HR-related. We load the employee data into Host Analytics according to types of employees and their country locations, which enables us to set payroll taxes, bonus levels and other benefits.”

Because Calypso is multinational, financial exchange rates have a critical impact on its budgeting and cash flow. Host Analytics helps Calypso understand those impacts and manage the expenses of foreign offices in their local currencies. “We pay salaries and other expenses semi-monthly, and in Host Analytics we can see how much money we are saving by comparing expenses at budgeted versus actual foreign exchange rates,” he says. “We just create a new scenario, seed the budget scenario and load actual exchange rates, then compare that to the actual data for the corresponding period.

This knowledge enables forward-looking planning. “If we know we are saving money on expenses currently, then we might be able to do more projects later in the year,” Palajac notes. “Host Analytics helps us understand the business better and drive decisions going forward.”

Customer Case Study: Calypso Technology, Inc.

Calypso Technology, Inc. (“Calypso”) provides software and services for financial institutions including

banks, asset managers, hedge funds, insurers and treasury services. Based in San Francisco, it also has

offices in 15 financial centers around the world. Calypso has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by

the deep knowledge of its employees in the financial technology industry. As the business expanded,

Calypso’s internal finance group realized that the Excel-based manual process used for budgeting,

planning and forecasting could no longer satisfy the needs of the expanding business.

“Host Analytics helps us understand the business better

and drive decisions going

forward.”

—Aaron Palajac, Financial Analyst, Calypso Technology, Inc.

challenges

• Managing budget data in Excel consumed time that would be better spent analyzing it

• Understanding of global costs for employees and foreign exchange rates was limited

• Executives and business unit managers had to wait for Finance to produce reports

solution

• Replace spreadsheets with Host Analytics for planning, close management, reporting, and analytics

• Use Advanced Workforce Planning to control employee-related costs in native currencies

• Enable users to access their own budget data and drill down to details

• results

• Budgets are created faster and understood more deeply, and forecasts are updated more often

• Managers and executives have information needed to make more knowledgeable decisions

• Finance has assumed a more strategic role that adds greater value to the business

“It makes our planning and forecasting a lot easier as well,” he continues. “If we want to know impacts on hiring in a new region, for example, we can put that together quickly.” Calypso now reforecasts more often, implementing quarterly forecasts and tracking actual changes in the interim periods in Host Analytics.

Empowering the business

Previously “it was very difficult to do management reporting on a monthly basis,”Palajac recalls. “We were spending most of our time collecting data, and we didn’t have time for much analysis of it.” As a result, executives and other decision-makers were not getting the information they needed in a timely way.

Now Host Analytics stores all the data in one place and facilitates ad hoc reporting. “Instead of a report taking a day or two, we can pull it together in a few minutes,” says Palajac. “Management gets the information faster, and we can perform any additional analysis they want so they can make better-informed decisions.”

In addition, Host Analytics empowers departmental managers to work with the data and do their own reporting instead of waiting for the finance team to do it. This has made a fundamental difference in the way people are accountable for their business units. “Instead of pushing information out to our various business partners, we load it all into Host Analytics and allow them to pull out what they need at the level they need,” he explains. “It saves us a lot of time and gives them transparency about their costs so they can budget better in the future.” Finance is working with the managersto begin entering their own budget data as well. As Calypso continues to grow, Palajac expects to bring managers in the foreign offices on board as users. The Host Analytics Cloud-based deployment model will make that easy.

Today the budgeting process requires only a few days for data collection and leaves time for analysis to ensure that the data is up-to-date and accurate. The move to Host Analytics also enabled a major cost avoidance for this company whose major expenses are people-related. “Since we’ve significantly reduced the amount of time in these processes, we haven’t had to increase headcount in the finance area,” says Palajac.

What began as merely a search for a financial planning and reporting tool has significantly increased the Finance team’s contribution to Calypso’s business. “We now have a more active role in our company, giving our internal business partners better feedback and helping them understand future costs,” he says. “Initially we were just looking for a planning and reporting tool. We’ve seen all of the benefits we wanted from the initial implementation, and now we are realizing extra ones.”

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