Lighting the way to a better budget for Encore Electric
Key results snapshot
Saved 1,800 hours by automating their budget cycle.
Reduced time to set up budget to 30 minutes with automated stakeholder contributions.
Improved days sales outstanding (DSO) by 40 days by tracking variables with appropriate level of detail.
Who is Encore Electric?
Founded in 2003, Encore Electric Inc., serves clients in the Rocky Mountain West to address complex and technical projects for developers, general contractors, and owner customers with electrical construction, technology solutions, and maintenance services. Recognized for safety, design, and quality by industry organizations and customers, Encore Electric credits the talent and work ethic of its more than 900 team members. Encore Electric is a privately held, employee-owned company based in Lakewood, Colorado.
Business challenges
With Microsoft Excel as their primary budgeting tool, Encore Electric had to constantly contend with broken formulas and typos in their templates. Each budget cycle, managers would spend close to 2,000 hours consolidating formulas and combining over 25 different spreadsheets. Their extensive approval process would often result in more customizations to templates. Encore Electric would start their budget cycle in July and end in November, two months after their fiscal year-end in September.
With only their ERP software to run reports and analyze data, Encore Electric’s key decision-makers struggled to create and run reports. Many users were mistakenly making decisions on live data that wasn’t closed, adjusted, or accurate. This degraded Encore Electric’s confidence in their data, creating bottlenecks that prevented them from analyzing job KPIs.
Applications deployed
Financial Planning and Analysis
System integrations
With Prophix at our fingertips, I was able to coach the finance team to help others in the company access the data they need. It’s helped us create a culture of self-service and has allowed our finance team to focus on strategic decision-making.
Josh Paul
Cost Accounting Manager, Encore Electric
Why Prophix
To address their ongoing challenges with budgeting, Encore Electric chose Prophix. Encore Electric’s Cost Accounting Manager had used Prophix at a previous company and was confident the platform could automate and improve their financial processes.
Prophix could also make a difference in supporting their remote workforce and scaling their organization.
The Office of the CFO recognized that the Prophix platform ease-of-use would reduce their dependence on Microsoft Excel. Additionally, the modern and user-friendly interface would enable Encore Electric to grow their business with increased confidence in their data.
Key results
Encore Electric implemented Prophix in 6 weeks and rolled out an improved budgeting process within the first year. Now, over 40 people are involved in the budgeting process, including all department heads. With standardized templates and workflows, it takes less than an hour to set up the budget. Additionally, project accountants can use Ad Hoc analysis to drill into their data for high-level and granular insights.
With Prophix, Encore Electric was able to:
Save 1,800 hours by automating their budget cycle.
Set up a new budget in 30 minutes and have each stakeholders’ contribution automatically roll up into the company budget.
Automate email report distribution to provide budget managers access to up-to-date budget vs. actual variance reporting.
Recreate their financial statements from their ERP in Prophix.
Create job cost dashboards to compare live and historical data.
Monitor KPI trends and track necessary variables, improving days sales outstanding (DSO) by 40 days.
Augment high-level data exported from Viewpoint Spectrum, like gross margin by hour, for up-to-date data.
Improve collaboration for remote workforce with improved, self-serve access to data.
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