Streamline Financial Analysis and Reporting with dbSeer’s Platform
dbSeer provides customized financial reporting platform solutions and IT services to authority brands, delivering accurate and timely financial and operational data. dbSeer integrates Oracle NetSuite® financial data with other data sources and automates key reports, allowing for improved analysis via dashboards, key metrics, and visualizations from all relevant data sources.
The platform offers real-time access to financial data that is up-to-date, validated, and secure, making it easier for authority brands to make informed decisions based on accurate data. With dbSeer’s platform, authority brands can streamline their reporting and analysis, and automate manual tasks, freeing up time and resources to focus on business growth.
• Authority Brands can now deliver improved analysis to customers via dashboards, key metrics,
and visualizations from all relevant data sources.
• Authority Brands customers have timely access to data that is up-to-date, validated, and secure.
The Customer
Founded in 2018, Authority Brands is North America’s premier home service franchisor. With more than $1.5 billion in revenue, they offer their growing network of 1,200+ franchise owners across the USA and Canada marketing services, cutting-edge technology, best-in-class training, and strong operational support. Their family of home service franchise brands are industry leaders who provide customers world class home services from the property line to the roof line.
The Opportunity
The Authority Brands (AB) Finance organization needed to automate generation of key financial reports and datasets used for analysis and investor reporting. Their current process of generating custom, ad-hoc reports was inefficient and slow. Also, making sure that reports included the most up-to-date financial and operational data was time-consuming and potentially error-prone.
AB sought a solution that would help them get timely source data updates with minimal delays and to free up resources to focus on accounting and financial analysis rather than on report compilation. The solution would need to integrate NetSuite financial data with operational data from other systems and apply different account hierarchies and categories without constraints from the accounting system. Their goals were to increase flexibility for generating timely and actionable reports while minimizing laborintensive and error-prone processes.
A key pain point for our finance team was the manual, time consuming process of consolidating data and reporting for multiple brands. We now have a standardized reporting solution that helps us respond to our investors in a more timely fashion.
~Ali Tafreshi, Chief Information Officer
The Solutions
The dbSeer team designed a reporting platform that incorporates financial and accounting data from NetSuite and other data sources into a data warehouse. Based on serverless architecture, the platform processes data and automates generation of key financial reports for more efficient report delivery and improved analysis. Future integration of other third party data sources is also easily supported as needed.
Identifying and Processing Key Data
The dbSeer team identified source data and mapped that data to required reporting outputs. For the data warehouse, they incorporated only the key data needed to enrich financial reports and created synthetic transactions for historical data not included in NetSuite so that all relevant data was addressed. In addition, reports required joining financial data from NetSuite with operational data from third party sources, such as FranConnect.
The team built an extract, transform and load (ETL) process based on Amazon Glue to reduce time in processing large data tables and transactional data based on defined business rules. Further processing included incorporating NetSuite raw data into an S3 data lake for later transformation, loading NetSuite data into the data warehouse for analytics applications and users, creating a job framework to track load activity and job execution, and automating notifications to be sent to relevant teams about successful (or unsuccessful) jobs.
Delivering Reports Efficiently and Enabling Improved Analysis
Once data was prepared, the dbSeer team produced sophisticated reports and dashboards using Power BI. The datasets joined NetSuite financial data with FranConnect operational data for custom summarization, tailored for different audiences.
Traditional financial reports such as Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and standardized third-party output reports can now be generated using account labels, hierarchies, and categories not historically maintained in NetSuite. Incorporating the latest NetSuite and FranConnect data into a single dataset has enabled Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reporting and tracking for corporate and franchisee use.
Ensuring Data Integrity
As part of discovery, development, and testing efforts, dbSeer uncovered issues with data consistency and completeness. Data Validation reports were created to highlight potential issues with source system data, enabling timely investigation and correction to ensure reporting accuracy.
Subject matter experts have been able to investigate and address data issues quickly. A job monitoring schedule and metrics are now in place to aid in maintaining data integrity. Also, scheduled jobs reload data and refresh reports so that data is up-to-date.
The Results
dbSeer carefully and quickly designed and delivered a financial reporting platform that has helped AB to ensure data is validated, up-to-date, and secure, while maintaining data integrity. Dashboards, key metrics, and visualizations are now available that incorporate NetSuite financial data and other data sources to enable more sophisticated analysis and empower timely business decisions.
As a result of dbSeer’s solution, Authority Brands can now:
- Minimize the amount of time spent generating recurring customized and ad-hoc reports for
current/potential investors and lenders. - Automatically generate timely, actionable reports, tailored for different audiences.
- Ensure data integrity to reflect the most up-to-date and accurate financial and operational data in
reports. - Support future integration of other third party data sources.
The dbSeer team was professional, flexible, and patient in working with our schedules. Because of their extensive background with data warehouses and deep data and analytics expertise, we could trust them to make progress and deliver without oversight from us.
~Ali Tafreshi, Chief Information Officer
Frequently Asked Questions:
- What is dbSeer’s Financial Reporting Platform?
It is a customized solution that integrates Oracle NetSuite® financial data with other data sources to deliver accurate, up-to-date financial and operational data. The platform automates key financial reports and offers improved analysis via dashboards, key metrics, and visualizations from all relevant data sources. - How does dbSeer’s Financial Reporting Platform benefit authority brands?
dbSeer streamlines financial reporting and analysis for authority brands, providing real-time access to accurate financial data. The platform allows for improved decision-making, automation of manual tasks, and more efficient use of resources, leading to business growth. - Is dbSeer’s Financial Reporting Platform customizable?
Yes, it is customizable to meet the specific needs of authority brands. The platform offers tailored solutions to improve reporting and analysis, and automate manual tasks, freeing up time and resources to focus on business growth.
