How Planwhiz Enables H2O.ai to Achieve Agile Cash and OPEX Management
1 Click
To create an expense report
20 hours
Saved per month for consolidation
3 Weeks
Time to value (implementation, training,)
5 seconds
To drill down transactional cashflow insights
The Challenge: Managing Growth with Precision
H2O.ai was growing rapidly, having raised $100M in their latest funding round, and the finance team was facing the challenge of managing this growth with precision. They needed to analyze their cash flow and expenses faster and with greater accuracy to ensure that they were making investments aligned with their long-term growth goals.
As a rapidly growing company, the finance team needed visibility into spend by department, by geographic region, and by category, as well as an understanding of the inflows and outflows of cash that impacted their burn rate. Traditionally, the finance team only looked at these metrics on a quarterly basis. However, with multiple new investors and stakeholders on board, they needed the information to be visible in real-time.
Compounding this challenge was the fact that revenue, expense, and headcount data were all in different systems, making it difficult for the finance team to get accurate, consolidated, real-time insight quickly into the financial indicators that mattered most. They needed a solution that would allow them to monitor their financials on a daily basis, with the ability to drill down into specific areas and identify areas for improvement or optimization.
The Solution: Analyze and Report Financial Data in Real-Time
To streamline their finance operations and get real-time insights, H2O.ai’s finance team turned to Planwhiz, a modern finance platform that connects teams and tools to automate financial insights. Within days of integrating Planwhiz, the finance team reduced the time it took to pull ERP data from hours to seconds. Instead of relying on manual data analysis, they could now gain insight from their financial data in real-time, from one centralized platform.
Planwhiz’s powerful analysis tools allow them to access consolidated expense metrics, view consolidated department and account-level expenses, and track key performance indicators in a single, easily accessible dashboard tailored to how they want to see their business. They can automatically calculate critical SaaS metrics such as MRR, ARR, and net burn rate, and load them onto interactive reports to create a shareable view of their cash position at any time.
Analyzing expenses is also much simpler. With transaction-level data automatically pulled into pre-populated reports, the finance team can easily view a consolidated list of department and account-level expenses and quickly drill down to analyze variances. One-click and they can seamlessly triangulate the long-term impact of high-variance expenses like hiring 10 new engineers. The team can also drill down to each expense, cash flow or headcounts during their monthly Budget vs Actual process to understand the variance much faster compared to using google sheets.
The Result: Cash and OPEX Reporting in Minutes
Before Planwhiz, H2O.ai’s finance team relied on manual spreadsheets and spent a significant amount of time consolidating revenue, expense, and headcount data from multiple systems. This process took hours to complete and was often error prone.
Today, the finance team can quickly consolidate all data and automate cash flow and opex reporting with Planwhiz, saving hundreds of hours on manual workflows. This has allowed them to gain real-time insights into their financial data from one centralized platform, making it easier to track key performance indicators, analyze expenses, and manage investments aligned with their long-term growth goals.
With more time and powerful insights at their disposal, the finance team has been able to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as creating more sophisticated hiring plans and planning investments into innovative projects. Planwhiz has become their go-to tool for confidently telling the story of their financial investments and costs, thanks to its real-time interactive dashboards and reports.
H2O.ai believes in democratizing machine learning for enterprises to help them make smarter decisions. They now apply the same philosophy to their finances as they do their business—moving beyond manual work into a world where finance tools help accelerate growth.
