Digita delivers transparent P&L reporting 95% faster

Reporting financial performance and key performance indicators (KPIs) to executives is highly important for Digita, a subsidiary of global investment firm DigitalBridge. However, feedback during the 2021 planning process revealed that business unit leaders lacked a comprehensive understanding of profitability.

The existing monthly profit and loss (P&L) reporting process involved multiple Excel spreadsheets, contributing to a lack of clarity and transparency, especially for business unit leaders who have varying levels of financial expertise. Overhead allocations did not accurately reflect each department’s activities. Additionally, human resources (HR) planning lacked transparency, and the actual drivers for the HR budget were unclear. The financial consolidation process also relied on Excel – a time-consuming, manual process that makes real-time reporting and analysis challenging.

Due to labor-intensive processes, the finance team had little time to focus on strategy or in-depth analysis. Their role was perceived as a reporting function that produced Excel spreadsheets to address stakeholders’ questions.

To address these challenges, Digita’s newly appointed chief financial officer (CFO) spearheaded a finance transformation initiative. After careful consideration, Jedox emerged as the optimal platform to streamline planning, budgeting, and forecasting, marking a critical step in their transformation journey.

The team then embarked on their first project with Jedox: creating a proper allocation scheme to enhance P&L transparency for Digita’s business units as well as DigitalBridge. The project included P&L, CapEx, and HR planning, and financial consolidation. The system incorporated various modules and complex allocation rules, resulting in a fully allocated P&L statement for Digita and its business units.

Jedox integrates seamlessly with Digita’s Microsoft ecosystem, consolidating relevant data from Excel, Microsoft Dynamics offerings for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), and Power BI. Jedox extracts valuable financial and operational data tables through a secure connection to Dynamics 365 and provides a clean layer to access this data. The finance team can now access all the data that matters within a single platform, and all management reporting data is automatically funneled into Microsoft Power BI, the team’s reporting layer. Approximately 50 users have adopted Jedox.

With its powerful automation and data integration capabilities, Jedox helped Digita’s finance team transition from basic reporting to actively partnering with departments across the organization to drive business success and tackle complex challenges. Finance actively offers valuable insights to support each business unit’s decision-making process.

Every business unit has access to transparent P&L statements within Jedox, significantly improving financial literacy and uncovering actionable insights. A monthly P&L reporting process that originally took two days now takes just two hours, and Digita no longer needs its QlikSense system. Complex dimensions and rule-based allocations enable confident decision-making based on accurate, real-time data. HR planning is centralized, providing clear drivers for staff budgeting. The team successfully employed this new finance infrastructure for 2023, successfully using the group consolidation module for their annual reports.

“Jedox has empowered the finance team to evolve beyond routine reporting and become valuable business partners.”

– Jani Koskinen, CFO, Digita

In the future, Digita plans to pursue driver-based forecasting, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, and implement rolling forecasts. The team also plans to expand Jedox to enhance operational planning, supply chain planning, and procurement optimization. With Jedox, Digita is well positioned to deliver clear insights for holistic planning across the organization.