Unmind has grown from 30 to 150 people in the last 2 years, and raised its $47m Series B funding in April 2021. David, the Finance Director and team, were running into the challenges of spreadsheet-based FP&A:
Combined with the pace of change of a hyper-growth business, these challenges resulted in a lot of out-of-date spreadsheets, hindering collaboration between the finance team and the rest of the business.
David, was looking for a solution that could automate his team’s day-to-day FP&A and reporting tasks as much as possible, provide accessible real-time dashboards and free up time to partner with the business on forward-looking projects and strategic planning.
Unmind worked with our customer success team to implement their full financial model in Causal over 6 weeks, including detailed and consolidated views for each of the 3 business entities from Xero. During the implementation, Unmind built separate modules for each part of their financial model: revenue, expenses, headcount, P&L, cashflow, balance sheet.
Unmind’s Causal model is connected to live data from Xero (3 entities), Hi Bob, and Google Sheets, and a CRM connection will be added in the near term. Causal’s Version Control functionality let David and his team save “Budget” and “Reforecast” versions of their models, and automatically compare them against Unmind’s actuals each month.
Unmind’s charts and tables update automatically in Causal as new data comes in and reforecasts are generated. David and his team have set up custom dashboards with different levels of access for different stakeholders. For the first time, there is real-time access to the financial KPI’s and each department head can track their own metrics against targets, self-serve.
Unmind’s dashboards have been viewed by multiple stakeholders around the business in the past month, and outputs from Causal have become a core part of the company’s board presentations.
David and his team can quickly generate new scenarios and reforecasts from their Causal model. What used to take a week in Excel can now be done in a day in Causal.
As a testament to this, part-way through the Causal implementation, a new business priority arose and David was able to quickly build a standalone model in Causal to present the new business case to the management team.
Unmind’s finance team has put day-to-day FP&A tasks on autopilot, saving 3–4 days per month:
This lets David and his team focus on strategic planning and business partnering. As the business evolves, reforecasting and scenario planning can be done in minutes rather than hours, and the team can now operate with full confidence in their numbers.
