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ISV Talks
ISV Talks
Keith Ellis CEO Vivid Reports on Making Reporting and Budgeting Easy with Excel
Carol Livingston interviews Keith Ellis, CEO at Vivid Reports, Inc., about how their CPM solutions have helped users simplify their financial Reporting and Budgeting needs using the familiar Excel user interface. If your clients already do reporting or budgeting in Excel, Vivid Reports, Inc. makes it easy to “Vivid-ize” those spreadsheets turning manual spreadsheet reports into automated templates with the same familiar format.
✅ Fast refresh speeds
✅ Convert existing spreadsheets or Management Reporter reports
✅ 60+ ERP integrations
✅ 87% retention rate
✅ 100% say support is easy
For multi-entity, multi-currency, complex roll-ups and report distribution, Vivid demos exceptionally well and scales when budgeting moves beyond spreadsheets
COMPANY WEBSITE: www.vividereports.com
Well, welcome to this episode of ISV Talks. I'm Carol Livingston of Dynamics Connections and your host of ISV Talks. And on this episode we have Keith Ellis, who's the CEO at Vivid Reports. Welcome, keith.
Speaker 2:Hey, thank you, Carol. I appreciate the invite today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for joining me today. I'm really excited we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics CPM, financial reporting, budgeting and that is something that I have a heavy background in. We'll kind of get into that. But welcome, and please introduce yourself and tell us who you are, how long you've been with Vivid Reports and a little bit about the company.
Speaker 2:Sure, why don't I give you a quick introduction? I appreciate that, carol. I'm Keith Ellis. I'm the CEO of Vivid Reports. I'm actually based in Western Canada, sitting in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a little river coming down through it. I can look out the window and see the mountains in the morning.
Speaker 2:It's kind of an idyllic setting, but the most important thing is, I'm about 35 minutes away from a major airport, so that makes it kind of handy. Vivid Reports we've been around for about 25 years and so the organization specializes in financial reporting and budgeting. That's what we do in life and it's really about simplifying financial reporting. It's helping that organization that's been working in Excel to stay in Excel but automate, take a lot of that manual process out, and so it fits with that organization. That's either you could be a smaller organization and you've got one person, two people, in the finance team and you've got to do your consolidation and get it out, but it's very scalable. So the situation, carol, you lived and breathed multiple countries, multiple instances of your ERP, currency conversion, many different entities that you now have to roll up, multiple year ends, multiple charts of accounts. We scale up and deal with that kind of situation very, very well, and so it's really an organization that understands, lives and breathes financial reporting and simplifying it for organizations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so a little bit of the company history. I know that you're not brand new. How long have you been in the channel history? I know that you're not brand new. How long you've been in the channel and what ERPs are you working with?
Speaker 2:So we work with about 60 different ERPs. Big ones, obviously, all of the Dynamics world SAID, SAP, Syspro, Epicor Don't ask me to name all of them. Netsuite another one, Acumatica is another one. Carol, thank you very much. Don't ask me to name the other 60, because we keep adding more and more and more all the time. Oh yeah, but also we're multi-ERP, so a lot of times customers are changing.
Speaker 2:So you might be GP going to BC. Well, you need a solution that's going to be able to connect in, work in a GP environment, pull that data in, be able to manage that data, be able to build your reports, but also have that information available to you when you move over to a VC environment or move over to any other one, or if you do an acquisition. Very typical, there's so much consolidation going on these days that you end up consolidating, you end up buying another one and they're on something different. So you've got to be able to make all that function together. Month-end reports don't stop for anybody. The show's got to go on. You've got to get it done. So having that ability to fold two different ERPs together is an important capability.
Speaker 1:And is there any industries that VividReport specializes in or works with in particular?
Speaker 2:I think we do have certain industries where we do a whole lot. So areas like security and manufacturing and distributional sales, not-for-profit, various forms of healthcare, various forms of municipality or public sector I mean that's a large swath. So what's typical is you've got some amount of complexity, meaning you might have more than one entity, or you've got that distribution of reports that you've got to get out, or you've got, maybe, multiple currencies or something like that. There's something in there that's causing you to do this, like even a simple not-for-profit. Think about all the different views on the financials you got to be able to produce. It's a real challenge.
Speaker 2:So you might have your board, you might have your internal stakeholders, you get your management reporting, but you probably have all sorts of program reporting. You might even have chapters. So even if you are a smaller entity, in that circumstance, with only one entity, you could have quite complex financials, way beyond what the normal ERP is going to be able to provide to you. So often, I think, for what we see, there's something complex in there that's creating what would be product reporting. Like Matt Elevator, they have this product reporting thing that two other reporting vendors failed at, so we were able to deal with it, or it's something with the number of locations, like Good Life Fitness. $1.6 billion worth of company, 500 locations. Imagine trying to get the package out to 500 locations once a month manually. That drives you crazy. So coming to a organization like that to deal with this is just easy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my background is finance and accounting and I was the director of a worldwide reporting organization for a software company. Yeah, my background is finance and accounting and I was the director of Worldwide Reporting Organization for a software company yeah. It is exactly what you said. You send out packages in different countries and different currencies and different formats and trying to consolidate and do financial reporting, daily sales report. Everybody had their different views. They wanted to see and so.
Speaker 2:Well, and you probably have what? Maybe 10 different roll up, 10 different entities, where you've got an ERP located locally. Way more than that, yeah, way more, Okay. So now you've got a scenario which is, let's say, you've got 10, 15. Who cares what the number is. Each one of them is in a different currency. They may even have the same chart of accounts. But now you've got to get all that data loaded centrally somewhere and you're basically starting to copy paste mark, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste into one set of templates and then you're going to the next, and the next and the next. So your ability is very low, your chances of making errands are very high, but the problem is more. You're locked, you're stuck. You don't have a simple way of kind of breaking out of this. I'm spending about a quarter of my life building, rebuilding, building, rebuilding reports versus in Vivid, where you can make those changes to the organization very, very quickly, change the reporting tree and be able to distribute the reports very, very quickly to reports very very quickly.
Speaker 2:So it's just a different scenario or situation where some organizations just need to unlock that amount of change for themselves, free up a bunch of time and then use that for other kinds of things and they get stuck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you mentioned financial reporting. That's like the financial statements department reports and so forth. But what about, kind of once you get the reporting in place, now it comes around it's budget season, so then what?
Speaker 2:yeah, so so we're one of the few organizations that does a phenomenal job of budgeting. A lot of times with organizations, the budgeting is it's kind of a spreadsheet that's interconnected with 20 other different spreadsheets and each one of them is kind of got a link back to the first, and that's how you're doing it, right? Yeah, and it's so easy to break. God forbid. Somebody adds a row or something like that and it breaks it on a thing, because then you can't track it down. You've got all kinds of vertical issues, and so what we're doing is we take that spreadsheet that people know because the change management is teaching them something completely different.
Speaker 2:We do all of the distribution, version control management. We do all the work around the consolidation so you immediately have your performant financials coming out of it. We use it internally for doing continuous EBITDA forecasting. That's a dynamic thing where we're pulling numbers out of our ERP system and we're doing dynamic forecasting on our programs and things like that to figure out what our EBITDA is going to be. And you see me in there every couple of days figuring out how things are going to change as you change your program. Yeah, afternoons, near real time, you're making your program. Yeah, you have to know. You have to know it's near real time you're making your decision.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it sounds like at Flexible enough, you could kind of do that best case, worst case, version one, version two and get an idea of what it could be on a forecast basis.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. You can have as many scenarios, as many forecasts as you want and you can do some very sophisticated things, like an organization today when they're setting up a budget spreadsheet. You need to know, as a manager, you need to have your context. What was I last year? What was I the year before that? Oh, by the way, can I drill down behind those numbers Like why was this number like this? Because I may not be all that familiar with it but I know invoices.
Speaker 2:I know physical stuff because I'm in the field. I know that invoice, now invoices. I know physical stuff because I'm in the field. I know that invoice, now I understand the numbers. So you have to be able to provide that context, and we do that, but go beyond that.
Speaker 2:When you're starting to forecast you don't need any level of accuracy at all. It can't just be straight line. You can't just take a number and say it's going to be that number every month. You might have seasonality you could, but it's not going to be great. So you might have seasonality. You might be using a particular unit like HeadCalf to do your forecasting, and so you need to have that adaptiveness to all those different kinds of environments, especially in budgeting, forecasting and those kinds of environments. And then you go beyond that and you start talking about distribution or you start talking about user self-service. How do I enable my managers, how do I build financial acumen out there in the field? Well, david's fantastic for those kinds of applications, because you don't realize how much people don't understand the financials. So when you're talking about budgeting specifically, the first and probably most common question you're going to get is what's EBITDA?
Speaker 2:You've got to make it approachable, for people that they understand more about it and you want to be able to capture those assumptions on what's going on underneath it. Making the financials more than simply retroactively reporting is really important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah and so, like in a lot of companies, it's not just the annual budgeting but it's in the re-forecast.
Speaker 1:Now we're doing the first quarter and forecast the rest of the year. So we have actuals for the first three months and maybe estimates. And what I found when I was working with reporting and users is that they wouldn't understand how things hit the financials and that there was a timing issue. So doing that variance analysis was really helpful to them to see. Oh well, that expense didn't hit in the first quarter. Now I got a budget in second quarter, yeah exactly Well, and knowing where it is.
Speaker 2:And so this is when you have automated AP, for example, being able to drill down. You've got an Excel interface on the front end. That's the user interface, but that's the window into the ERP as well. That's allowing you to drill down and say, well, what were the transactions that made up that number? What were the GLs that made up that number? How do I get below that to actually look at the invoices themselves and be able to see what's there? So all of that functionality that you need to have if you're really going to have people understand the numbers and what's behind them. Where'd that come from? You got to be able to answer that question. Most people can't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And, like I said, it's usually like oh well, they didn't spend as much as they thought to and maybe it's because of the invoice was like for half of the invoice, half of the amount that they expected, and so yeah, being able to look at the invoice is probably huge.
Speaker 2:Well, and it'll change a couple of things. When you're a finance leader, you want to mature things, you want to make change happen. So first of all, you've got to unlock all that time, like get rid of the manual time that you're spending building your reports and distributing the reports. So the more you can get rid of that, the more time you unlock. And in a lot of controller offices about 25% of the time, if you can imagine that it's huge. And so once you step past that, you're into.
Speaker 2:Well, the more eyes I have on this, the more my team is engaged. These are not just the numbers that I look at and throw away. It's a tool. I'm going to look at that tool. I'm going to be able to engage with that tool because it tells me more than just the numbers. It tells me what's behind the numbers. I can get into it as soon as you start doing that.
Speaker 2:Now, one of the changes that happens is you've got a lot of eyes on the finance and those eyes are actually helping you catch errors that get made, misclassifications, all kinds of things that are happening, and it's just natural that these things are happening because you don't have the kind of business input that you need, and so when you get into that kind of drill down, we call it self-service. Self-service finance is about transparency. It's about getting your finance managers the data but also the drill down so they can see the level of detail that you allow them to see. It saves huge amounts of time in the finance office, but take the sound of your time and finances consumed by asking or answering other people's dumb questions that they can look up for themselves and go get the answers.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and it's kind of like everybody becomes a little bit of a business analyst for their organization or their department. So that's pretty helpful if they can get out themselves and analyze and ask questions of the data themselves.
Speaker 2:And you're passionate about it, like you as a department leader. You see a miscoded invoice that's on your department P&L. You're passionate about that. You're going to look at that and say, hey, what's this doing here? Yeah, of course, and you boot it because you talk to them. You can say, hey, this is incorrect, but you get the information to support it, rather than months later you're trying to manage that kind of a problem versus on the spot, you're seeing things come in.
Speaker 1:it's real time yeah exactly there's so much time for the finance team and, like back to when I was doing all the reporting, I'd probably say 80 of our time was crunching numbers and maybe 20 was analyzing it to try to explain variances or trends, and not even really making people self-sufficient like you're saying. Give them self-service reports, let them get in and look at the data.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think there's two layers to it Finance has to move out of that rearview mirror. In other words, I could be running a finance team where every report I'm getting is six weeks irrelevant because it happened six weeks ago.
Speaker 2:So it doesn't help me day or tomorrow, because I'm closing my bank account, but or I flip it around the other way and the tooling itself is designed for people who are. When you refresh, it's everything that's happening as of now, we're all transactions. By the time I get to the month end, I already know what that number is plus or minus, next to nothing. And that's the way we use it internally and that's the way companies start to use it as they go forward and as they're rolling forward. It's just a different organization.
Speaker 1:And even the financials of the departmental reports. That's old news. Now it's always about what are you going to do tomorrow to make up that difference or to exceed the budget and forecasting and kind of re-looking at your business, making changes and better decisions because of that insight they had.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it kind of build on that idea. So you've got let's stabilize core financials. Let's get that simpler. Let's just simplify this as much as we can.
Speaker 2:But then, now I've got that time, I can spend my time doing variance analysis because that's on me as a financial executive, so it's on me as a financial and it's better for me to have that tooling in my here's, my financials. Give me the variance analysis. Well, we have it. Click, compare the two columns. There it is and you can sort them up and down by what's the biggest variance from a percentage or size perspective. All that kind of stuff. I can see my trends, I can see my history of spending in a particular category. All that sort of stuff is at my fingertips. Stuff is at my fingertips because, as a financial professional, it's my commentary and color. How do I draw people to certain numbers? It's the behind the scenes on this. So whether I'm standing in front of the board doing this or I am sending it out and I'm giving this information to my stakeholders, I need to put that together. So people are saying, hey, I'm watching this, I'm keeping an eye on these things, I'm mindful about certain areas. But think about your covenant reporting.
Speaker 2:When you go down into even something simple like covenant reporting the format, the structure, the way it's put together, the exceptions, it's all driven by somebody else and they change their mind from time to time, okay, and so you've got to be able to push that out into an Excel spreadsheet very quickly, validate, make sure it's flowing correctly, like all that is repeated month after month after month after month, and it goes out on a certain day like clockwork, and if you miss it you're in breach. These are the risky situations, and compliance is getting more and more difficult for a CFO. When you think about all of the 100 different analysis that's going on like that every month, one on top of the other, the other on top of the other, it's big. So removing and simplifying all that just has this massive thank you kind of feel about it.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and I wish we had a tool like this. When I was a CFO and doing bank covenant reporting and board packages and all the different, like you said, stakeholders in the business. It was really challenging and so and if anybody, God forbid, asked for a change or added a new account, then you had to redo all your financial reports.
Speaker 2:And you get into all these kind of weird use cases, like there's organizations that have Vivid alongside other exceedingly large solutions, but they're using more for the planning side, and it's because of that there's always that ad hoc nature of finance.
Speaker 2:There's always these things that you've got to build and rebuild very, very frequently, and Vivid is just exceptional at that. But when you're in an organization that doesn't have, it's not that you can't rely on IT, but you can't put the pressure on them and nor can they keep up in the speed at which you need to do something in finance or you need to educate them there. You need something that you, as a finance professional, can do yourself, because you understand the intelligence of that spreadsheet and how it's built to be able to do it yourself. And so once you're able to step into being able to do that analysis, you say, ah, this is great and the business loves it. Now I've got to repeat it every single month. Well, in the absence of something like what we have, you've got a problem on your hands, because that's yet one more task that's going to take you a couple hours.
Speaker 1:And the tool is Excel, which is the finance professional's probably gold standard for reporting. You live and breathe there.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, exactly. You live and breathe there. Exactly, yeah, exactly. You live and breathe there. And there's so much intelligence, like the way you do your analysis, the way you do your product segmentation, the way you do different types of segmentation analysis. There's so much intelligence built up in those spreadsheets.
Speaker 2:You simply couldn't throw that into a technology-centric system. You couldn't throw that into a technology-centric system, like if you had IT build it. The variances and the way you structure it, the way you want to look at the data and the way you're looking at it today. I can guarantee you six months from now, you're going to be looking at it differently because the more sophisticated you get, the more sophisticated you have to get. So financial reporting is a continuous evolution. You get your core, you get your board, your board reporting. You've got your core management reporting. You've got your monthly reporting package, but the FP&A layers of it are continuously pushing boundaries of different layers of how can we look at this and gain insight. That's going to happen. So today, more than ever, all the dumb competitors are dead. It's on you to see how do I find that edge? How do I find?
Speaker 1:another way of looking at this that's going to help my customer, the business partner, perform better. Yeah, awesome. And just to kind of ask you you mentioned a customer. Is there a customer case success story that you could share with us?
Speaker 2:Let me share a couple because I think the ones I had mentioned earlier. Matt Elevator, that's your typical. I think they have about three, four locations. It's your manufacturing organization. They had failed with other reporting vendors before they came to us and part of it is just our ability to deal with very, very complex situations. In their case it was product expectation was one of the complexities of the complexities and the way their team was approaching it, trying to really get past the core reporting, get past your kind of monthly packaging and get down into the details of how we're doing product allocations and things. But let's pick on the smaller guy for change, because I think every vendor you talk to probably picks on the huge and we've got lots of stories about really, really big ones. But let's take Prairie School, south or South school, okay okay it's 38 schools, tiny, tiny little finance team like two, okay.
Speaker 2:So imagine you're the finance professional in that organization. It's public sector. You got tons of reporting. You've got lots of layers up on top of you that needs to see it. You got to get a package out to every principal. There's 38 of them that you've got to get it out to every single month. Now imagine that it's now taking you five, six days to do your month end. When are you sleeping? When are you sleeping? And so in this case, here it was taking days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like, imagine the impact on that person's life. Like that's, I get to go home. It's this massive leap in efficiency. But then you layer on top of that budgeting. I got 30 separate schools. Every one of them has special needs, okay. Every one of them has special needs, okay. And so you've now got to coordinate 38 separate stakeholders into a budgeting process.
Speaker 2:So it's where are you going to have impact? Impact in a large organization like Good Life. You have 500 locations, $1.6 billion worth of company. Yeah, you get that kind of impact, but it's visceral when you're dealing with some of those small guys and I love them, like the small versus the large. Let's talk larger just for fun. Okay, last, okay, I was the largest parking operator in the us.
Speaker 2:Okay, this is where things get kind of fun, because now you've got 1,400 variations of their financial statements monthly. Okay, now you've got to automate and distribute to every single partner they have. You've got 2,400, I think locations. You've got to do financials on every single one of those locations. Imagine that job. And then you've got to do you've got all these partners and you've got all these variations on the financial reports. They've got to go out to the partners. Well, you've got to go out to the partners. Well, you've got to coordinate, get a bill, distribute, automate and because of the number of variations, you have to keep it in Excel, otherwise there's no way you're going to keep up. It's just not possible to evolve or have a flexible enough reporting system if you're not in Excel, because you just can't rebuild it fast enough.
Speaker 2:Everybody's changing their mind all the time. So now that's 1,200. Imagine that, dude, 1,200 variations of your financials, you do monthly Big job. And that's just leaving the FP&A and all these other kinds of things off the table, though they love us for that. We're so integrated into that operation and how it works and how it functions and the kinds of things they do and what the customers are expecting. It's enabling them to function in a little different way, but love them to death. Like there's just an anomaly Sharp, sharp, sharp, sharp people, but visceral Think Prairie South.
Speaker 2:How do I change my world by simplifying financial reporting? How do I change my world by simplifying financial reporting? Well, I have to get that load of what I have to do at month end off of me. Allow myself to simply work on how do I build a better reporting structure for my stakeholders? No-transcript. Well, yeah, like it's going to be like two hours of work, not four days. So well, now you've saved up and that's times 12 because you get the monthlies and then you get your annual on the audit side, which can take a ton of time too. Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been there, done that.
Speaker 2:Push a button to generate the lead sheet for a season. You're running out of time answering questions.
Speaker 1:I wanted the easy button.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, when your auditor asks you for the sampling, here's your lead sheet. And then they say, hey, give me the transactions you want to be able to go into Vivid. Pull that account, hit Excel, dump them over to them so they can do their audit. Just simplify. That's what you got to do, just simplify.
Speaker 1:I feel better already.
Speaker 2:You're sold right, that's good.
Speaker 1:I know I'm totally. I do. I wish I had those.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a number of people out there that love Vivid. We've been around for a long time. Oh yeah, we're just a good secret.
Speaker 1:I do. Yeah, I know the partners tell me all the time stories of how Vivid has helped their customers. And you said you use it internally, which is great, so that's perfect. What are some of the new things? Just kind of change gears here a minute. What are some of the new things that you're looking to introduce, to continue to add value?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's a great question. So obviously, you've got AI and you've got a lot of different directions in terms of cloud and et cetera, et cetera that are happening and we have a full cloud system, and the way we've approached it is very, very different. You have to be tail first in our world, because that's where our CFO lives and breathes. But one of the things we've done is enabled that to be a full cloud. Excel, which is you've got Excel on your desktop, it's communicating with Excel cloud and it's in a controlled environment. So it's a login controlled environment where you're really able to say I've got one version of truth, it's this thing here that's being held in the cloud and I'm able to see it through browser. I'm able to see it through Excel. I can harmonize those files, so they're the same. I can manage the drill down on those files, so they're the same. These types of cloud computing changes you've got. They're very significant.
Speaker 2:Ai is another more significant thing. So, whether you're using that on the development side of your team, like we're continuously working and experimenting, the challenge that you get into in your financials is it's almost the inverse of what AI is designed to do. Ai is designed to interpret what you're saying and it gives you a different answer every time. If you did that in your financial reports, you'd be fired. You might be. You're not allowed to kind of wing it like that's just not what to do. But and a lot of people are very sensitized, like they're the financial reports are. That's the, that's the gold thing.
Speaker 2:you you have to be so careful and and we're called upon to to prove our security levels. We're called upon to prove how we control who sees what. When we're doing just automated distribution, things like that, and we're very good at that when you're dealing in an AI type of system, who are you letting see this Like? It's true, you have dedicated LLM, but are you going to trust that and that's that's? These are questions that different people have, so we're being mindful of how we approach that. You have to be very, very careful in terms of how you approach that.
Speaker 1:That's really good that I'm thinking not only about security, but just governance. You just don't want anybody. Some of that data might be sensitive and you don't necessarily want just anybody to have access.
Speaker 2:These analytic tools that are AI-driven. How do I control you, Carol, can ask about payroll, but you can't see this person's salary. In an AI world, you can't control that. You don't know what it's going to say. So you have to be very, very, very, very careful. You have to think security first. As soon as you're dealing into financial statements, you are the stewards of helping that CFO govern and provide the tooling state. So if they think it's a fantastic idea and they install, somebody's going to find some weird way of using that thing and getting beyond your security protocol. It's terrible.
Speaker 2:So, you have to be very careful about these kinds of things. I think the big one now like when you really think, going forward in terms of what finance needs to be and where it's evolving, the whole world of operational alignment how do I drive greater visibility, greater operational alignment I mean this is huge. This whole idea of finance as a service, finance as a forward-looking service, is a massive shift. It's gone from finance in a rearview mirror to finance at the table, to finance moving forward, moving the business forward. And as soon as you're there, you are into things like user self-service. How do I create greater transparency? How do I teach you as a business to use the financial statements to guide and drive? Well, that's a golden philosophy.
Speaker 2:So our architecture in that area and we've had that for a long time we just continue to deepen. How do you drill down? How do you see variance? How do you see trend? How do you see these other kinds of things? That the tooling itself is not just the financial statements. The numbers are the start. It's seeing the auto numbers into what these numbers mean and help you get there. As a business professional, those are the things that are really critical.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely Like. What does this mean and what's kind of that impact on us moving ahead and different decisions we can make?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then like how many people are so like they're surprised why are my business disconnected when I'm coming around to budget? Well, it's because they look at the financial statements. They go, oh, throw it out, okay, got it Did. Okay, made my number check. They don't use it. They don't routinely, routinely engage with those financials on a month-to-month basis, a week-to-week basis. And the more you can get them in that direction, the more the business starts moving toward this fact-based decision-making. Understanding the financials is critical to me as a business professional, and that changes things dramatically for the organization.
Speaker 1:So any other observations of maybe what customers are trying to do to improve operational effectiveness, not only kind of financial profitability, but just any other observations about the marketplace.
Speaker 2:I'm glad that idea of user self-service 10% of your time is sucked up in there. Okay, so don't step away from that. It's pure operational improvement. That's one of the top things you can do as a financial professional. But I think one of the bigger ones that's hitting out there is it's getting a lot more complicated. You can't get away from multiple views on your financials and the idea of one center of truth powering many, many, many different perspectives on the financials. It's an old theme, but when you look at the amount of consolidation that's going on in the market today, you look at the number of times an organization has not just one, three ERPs, it's crazy. The complexity is unreal.
Speaker 2:So the idea of kind of future-proofing your business and saying how do I do something today? That's going to give me a lot more headroom. It's going to have a lot more flexibility and agility, because your reality is, as soon as you're locked into something that's hard to change, you're in trouble as a financial executive, because the one thing in finance that's absolutely true today complexity is rising. Pace of change is increasing. Your agility as a financial professional needs to rise. Your ability to respond and repeat, and respond repeatably needs to rise, because the compliance environment is not getting easier. It's getting harder. The complexity of the company is not getting easier. It's getting harder. The complexity of the company is not getting easier. It's getting harder. Even if you consolidate back and you've got one ERP, one GL, you've got all these different locations, your need to drive increasing volumes of reports is much higher. So it's that complexity of how do I future-proof my business. That's one of the key themes that's going on today. That's critically important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and thinking about not where we are today as an organization, but maybe in the future we might have different needs and we need something that can evolve and scale with us.
Speaker 2:It's flexibility and agility. Those are the biggies with us. It's flexibility and agility, those are the biggies being able to do everything, be able to make sure people get only what they're allowed to see. But how do I, as a financial professional, be really flexible and agile? In my response that I need to provide another report once a month Fantastic, that should be my answer. Let's do this. And because it only should take you, push the button and out it goes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Easy button. I want that easy button. Let me ask you just kind of to wrap up here, what's kind of the one reason or driver that you see that people, customers, partners, come talk to you.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of them, carol, as you might imagine, and I think some of it has to come down to there's different ways of approaching financial reporting. One way of approaching financial reporting is very IT-centric. I'm going to buy an ERP and I'm going to use the financial reporting in the ERP. I'm going to get a data link, I've got my data analytics guys, and that tends to be very rigid. That tends to be sure it's there and you get the basics, but it's very rigid and it's very slow to respond. The other way you can think about it is I'm very visualization-centric. I want really cool dashboards.
Speaker 2:I want my board to see and I can drill down a little bit, do some stuff, but also that's the wrong end of the horse, because the numbers tend to be a little suspect, like if you think about Power BI. The logic in Power BI is every single widget has its own logic and so there's no surprise that revenue could be different in two different widgets, because it has the own logic, is built into the widget, the visualization piece, and so on one end of the spectrum it's slow, it's rigid, it's hard to move, and the other end of the spectrum you're taking a lot of risk because you're not centralizing the business logic. Where we're coming from is well, why don't you think about making it simple and being able to do it yourself, but in the framework of centralized logic? So you've got the openness and flexibility to excel, but you've got that safety net of everything is defined by business rules. What do I mean by this? What do I mean by revenue? What do I mean by consulting? What do I mean by these expense categories? Those are defined across the organization, so if I change it in some way, it cascades.
Speaker 2:You might have 500 spreadsheets. Well, it cascades across all 500. They're all in sync and so what brings people to us ultimately are the ones that I know at some level. Everything comes back to Excel. I know what's going to be in there, I know my analysis is there. I know my reporting is there. I've got this logic I'm never going to get away from Excel. And so once I'm at that point, I say what is my best tool into that environment where I want the numbers to be bulletproof? It doesn't matter what happens to my business, I want the numbers to be bulletproof, I got weird things.
Speaker 2:One version of truth, one version Exactly Every single point she lines up. Nobody can mess it up. And that's where people come to us is they want it, they know they've got something complicated or they think it's complicated going on. And they come to us because they look guys, we know you've been doing this for 25 years. You've seen every variation out there.
Speaker 2:But, more importantly, the way we handle periods and the way we do the roll up, the way our performance works, so it's really really fast this makes that whole thing much simpler for them, so that they feel, hey, I don't need to be a power user to build this. I can get my hands on this and do it myself. I'm a CFO, I've been doing this for 30 years. I could do it myself, because I understand that this thing thinks the way I think, because it's been built by financial professionals and it's very evident that it was built that way. Yeah, that's what brings us people. That's what brings us people to us.
Speaker 2:I got something complicated. I just need you to take this, make it simple, make it easy to understand and do it. And it's not that you're making a trade-off. Simplicity does not need to be a trade-off. It's not. It's the power. It's the differentiation. It's really what makes nimbleness happen within an organization, because I can do it, all of my team members can do it, and I'm not relying on waiting for IT or a power user to get around to it at some point.
Speaker 1:You don't need to hire a data scientist here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nor would you want to afford one. Most people can't. And then you've got to build a data lake and you've got Databricks sitting out there. You've got these big data pipelines going in and I'm like this is not what we're trying to do here. That's not simplifying, it's creating rigidity.
Speaker 2:Exactly, Exactly. I want to mention, just before we get there, the number of people who call me because they say Carol mentioned and I keep seeing you on Carol's show. So thank you so much. Seeing you on Carol's show, so thank you so much. I think there's just so many people out there in the community who work together with you and trust the organizations that you're recommending to work with them, and I appreciate being one of them. So if people are looking to talk to us, I encourage you to go to our website, visit vividreportscom. That's probably the easiest way. I know you have a lot of podcast listeners that listen in. So, VividReportscom, pop in there and take a look at the partner program or just contact us If you want to reach me directly.
Speaker 2:Keith Ellis, the CEO, we're very, very partner-centric, as partners have things that they're doing. So often there's an urgency, there's an immediacy of response, there's a quality response that people want. That's one of the reasons why we've got hundreds of partners, but it's to give it that personal touch and say look, I will pick up an answer and I will make sure that we deal with this for you. Send me an email at keithls at vividreportscom. For those of you listening, not watching. It's keith K-E-I-T-H dot L-S at VividReportscom. Just use that if you want to send me an email and we can and certainly I can I can tie you up to the correct people.
Speaker 1:Perfect. So, guys, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of ISV Talks, and thank you, keith, for being on our podcast. I appreciate it very much. Well, thank you, and thank you everyone for joining our podcast today. We'll see you on the next episode of ISV Talks.