An abundance of modern FP&A SaaS software products have launched in the last few years, each with their own pros and cons. How best to wade through them all? The right blend of functionality, integrations, security, onboarding time, and pricing should lead you to the right service for you.
Accounting Integrations
The workhorse in your day-to-day financial picture is undoubtedly your ERP software. This is your system of record for accounting and reporting, and contains your full financial picture from inception through today. Ready and persistent access to this data is critical to connecting your financial past with your future.
Telemetry supports native connections to the top four accounting systems on the market: QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, and Netsuite. These connections ensure that your historical data is always up to date, and your projections that rely on that historical information are as fresh as possible.
HRIS / Payroll Integrations
For many companies, employee cost is their largest expense. Your accounting system receives a basic payroll journal entry twice a month, which merely includes totals for wages, benefits, and payroll taxes. That is helpful to a point, but understanding the makeup of what goes into that wage number by department or individual is paramount. Employee detail will give you much more fidelity into where your wage dollars are spent.
Telemetry supports native connections to 30 of the most popular HRIS / payroll providers in the industry, including ADP, BambooHR, Gusto, Paychex, Rippling, Workday, and Zenefits. This means that your wage spend information is always up to date, with the ability to assign specific people or department costs to other individuals inside your organization.
Bulletproof Security
Your financial data is highly confidential and always needs to be handled with the utmost care and security. You should only look for vendors who have attained the highest degree of security certification, as validated by an independent auditor.
Telemetry is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, the gold standard for industry security. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest without exception and we do not store any unnecessary data such as payment methods. Telemetry engages with security partners to proactively probe our applications and infrastructure to determine weaknesses and evaluate our security posture. Finally, Telemetry practices a layered approach to security for our networks. We implement controls at each layer of our cloud environments, dividing our infrastructure by zones, environments, and services. Our security certification and practices will ensure that you can sleep well at night knowing that your confidential financial data is safe.
Instant Value
Most tools in the modern FP&A space access your business model by making you recreate your entire plan inside their cloud tool. This means rebuilding your assumptions and formulas outside of a familiar spreadsheet and then continuing to manage your model in their cloud over time. In fact, most companies already have their business model in Excel or Google Sheets and leaving a powerful, familiar, and universal tool for something custom is not appealing. Furthermore, with most other tools, the migration of your plan takes months. Then once migrated, you are now beholden to that new tool since migrating back is equally time-consuming. Instead of a multi-month onboarding, you should be looking for a product that delivers instant day one value.
Telemetry takes a totally different, practical approach that means you’ll be up and running on our platform in less than an hour. As an approved vendor for both Microsoft and Google, Telemetry has native spreadsheet plugins in the Microsoft AppSource Marketplace and the Google Sheets Marketplace. These plugins talk to your existing business model, keeping your spreadsheet current when you close months and staying informed with changes to projections for future months. This means you keep your business model in your spreadsheet of choice, completely obviating the need for migrating to a new tool. The result is months of time saved and the advantage of keeping your model in a tool you already know and love.
Fits Your Existing Workflow
You already have a method of working amongst your team and your systems of record. Radical departures to existing workflow mean a significant cost to your business in terms of time and frustration. It is therefore incumbent to adopt a tool that works WITH the systems you already have in place and augments them, as opposed to replacing them wholesale.
As the above points demonstrate, Telemetry works with your existing ERP and HRIS systems and integrates with your existing spreadsheet-based business model to build workflow that is powerful, yet familiar. This means you get more done faster, with no integration headaches or significant retraining.
Transparent, Affordable Pricing and Free Trial
Almost nobody in the FP&A space lists their software pricing on their website – frankly because it’s too expensive – so in turn there is no instant purchase ability. Who wants to talk to a salesperson, pushing you toward a mid five figure annual commitment, before you start using new software?
Telemetry instead publishes pricing for their affordable plans, and offers the ability to get going from day one without talking to sales at all. It even offers a 14 day free trial without requiring a credit card and a free forever plan for smaller companies. Now you can derisk your purchase and try before you buy. Head to https://www.telemetry.fi/ today to get started for free.
