A New FP&A System for Comprehensive Financial Insights – Petroleum Products Company

Before:

Need for a Comprehensive FP&A System

The company’s several lines of business meant data flowed into their systems from multiple sources. However, without an overarching IT system, this data remained scattered, preventing the team from making accurate financial plans. With a cross-functional team and multiple stakeholders, organizing and consolidating this data became particularly challenging.

To address these issues, this company reached out to Spaulding Ridge. Spaulding Ridge was tasked with implementing an FP&A accelerator for integrated P&L and balance sheet.

Solution:

Self-Balancing Sheets, Forecasting Models, and Workforce Planning for Streamlined Financial Operations

Spaulding Ridge carried out the implementation in three phases: foundation, implementation, and user testing. During the foundation phase, we worked with the company’s team to understand their data flow and the outputs they expected from the system. Through these discussions, we developed documents that captured their needs and designed solutions to streamline their FP&A solution. We also created plans to manage these changes within their current workflow without disrupting business processes. Once all documents were aligned, we moved to the implementation phase, where we conducted preliminary analysis on data and hierarchies.

To automate the assessment of their working capital, the company needed a self-balancing sheet. We built an integrated and automated funding routine for their self-balancing sheet with closed-loop interest and taxation impact. This provided them with greater control over transactions and data while ensuring security. With an immediate understanding of their taxes, they could determine their liability well in advance.

Externally, we took measures to optimize the financial system. Internally, we created separate divisional models for detailed margin planning and analysis for individual teams, which were automated to consolidate financials. We built CapEx models at both asset and project levels to support strategic decision-making. Financial planning was also done at the employee level, including detailed workforce planning for compensation modeling. This helped the company plan how assets were allocated across different business functions and determine investment levels.

We future-proofed the company by building multi-tiered “what-if” version analyses, enabling version mix and match specific to each division. Finally, we enabled multiple reporting hierarchies for accounting and management reporting views, ensuring transparency while maintaining confidentiality.

In the final phase of user testing, employees were given hands-on experience and trained on the model. This ensured they understood that the model was built to serve them and how to use it to its fullest potential.