Industry
Multi-Entity & Multi-Currency
Case study
StorCentric
Discover how StorCentric automated cash flow forecasting and enabled better decision making.
Case study
StorCentric
Discover how StorCentric automated cash flow forecasting and enabled better decision making.
About the Company
StorCentric provides world-class award-winning data management solutions. Between its Drobo, Nexsan, Retrospect, Vexata, and Violin Systems divisions, the company has shipped over 1M storage solutions and has won over 100 awards for technology innovation and service excellence. StorCentric innovation is centered around customers and their specific data requirements and delivers quality solutions with unprecedented flexibility, data protection,
performance, and expandability
Employees
500+
Locations
US, UK, Canada, India
Challenges
Storcentric has grown exponentially over the past five years. They have acquired multiple companies in different geographies. As a result, managing their NetSuite cash flow on a weekly basis and forecasting cash became a major complication.
To manage cash, accurate knowledge of when AR invoices get paid is critical for scheduling Vendor payments and deciding when to tap into bank credit lines. Multiple systems, entities, currencies, and bank accounts exacerbated the cash flow and forecasting issues. Just pulling the data from different systems and assembling the data could take half a day. By the time weekly cash forecasting was presented to the executive team, the data was already stale. In addition, StorCentric had to manage discounts, understand which customers availed of early payments, and how prioritize payments based on cash inflows and outflows.
Managing different versions of excel with different team members became cumbersome and they needed a solution to streamline this process.
Solution
Payference’s automated 13 weeks cash forecasting model was a perfect fit. Payference reduced the cash forecasting variance to within 5% of actuals for next 5 weeks and within 15% of variance for up to week 13.
By enabling automated AR reminders, StorCentric was able to get payments in 30% faster than before.
The AI models Payference created improved the accuracy of the company’s cash inflow by 20% - giving the client team higher confidence in their cash position.
Payference also established an automated payment prioritization based on the cash on hand at any given week. This allowed the Payroll payments to be set at a higher priority than the Vendor payments.
Using scenario modeling, Storcentric is able to reduce unknowns and make faster decisions on funding and growth.
"Driving decision-making using Payference has been a game changer for us.” - Mike Edwards, CFO
Results
Through automation, Payference significantly simplified the company’s previously tedious cash forecasting process. The solution extracted data from different systems to minimize error-prone manual work. Payference not only conserved company resources but also gave them real-time visibility into their cash flow.
The company’s team leadership highly valued the simple and clear visual reporting on major KPIs. This included representation of DSO, DPO, and the cash conversion cycle, providing levers to optimize them.
Payference ensures its systems are user-friendly so adopting new cash management processes becomes effortless. The time needed for all users to learn the ways of the system and get accustomed is now available for another task
“Early on, we ran cash forecasting through Excel in parallel to Payference. We had the occasional data issue that got fixed over a few weeks,” says Kelly Brayshaw, the finance director at Storcentric. The difference, she says, is that the team not only attempted but also provided immediate fixes. “We never had to file tickets or deal with long hold-times,” a reality for many companies implementing new software.
In fact, Brayshaw notes how her feedback made its way into the product development roadmap, not only creating a more individualized solution for Storcentric but also expanding the solution potential for other Payference clients. “We talked about features like variance analysis and scenario comparison that very soon got incorporated into the product.”
“I didn’t have any learning curve to use Payference. Payference gives me complete visibility into our cash flow.” - Surya Turaga, COO
“I’m very impressed with how easy it is to use and get insights from Payference’s cash analytics’ offering.” - Mike Edwards, CFO