Reporting and Multi-Currency Support Empowers CompTIA

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a non-profit trade association, issues professional certifications for the information technology industry. It is considered one of the industry’s top trade associations. Headquartered in the greater Chicago area, with numerous locations around the world, CompTIA supports IT professionals through education, certification, advocacy, and philanthropy initiatives.

CompTIA’s budgeting and planning solution, Microsoft Forecaster, had a number of shortfalls that were critical for CompTIA to resolve. For years, international users were frequently locked out of the software on the server in Chicago. It was a struggle to simply access or record their budget numbers. The application couldn’t roll forward prior budgets or utilize actuals.

“You always had to build budgets from the ground up.”

– CFO Brian Laffey, CFO, CompTIA

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Creating unique reports consumed CompTIA’s finance team every month. Specific parameters that each manager wanted to see had to be identified monthly for the report view to be created. The process involved downloading data to Excel, filtering and sorting the data, and then individually creating each report.

CompTIA landed on Centage after searching for a more dynamic, flexible solution that could better manage their international operations and address the need for more budget accuracy and analytical reports.

Streamlined financial reporting saves time and company resources

“It was Finance developing it all [monthly reports for departments], so it was a task that was really tapping a lot of our resources. Centage has been an immense time-saver.”

Centage now allows CompTIA’s finance team to integrate data from multiple sources, easily build and manipulate driver-based financial models, predict balance sheet and cash flow performance with accurate and automated forecasts, and run what-if scenarios to test the impacts of strategic decisions.

Our formula-free FP&A software gives the CompTIA team confidence that the budgets they develop are reliable and accurate. Strict adherence to the chart of accounts alleviates concerns about data integrity by catching potential coding errors while increasing the value of the plans developed with one-to-one comparisons between budgets and actuals.

Centage offers the flexibility for users to enter exact counts, dollars, and percentages in value fields – in the past users spent their already scarce time making trial-and-error guesses to get to the value that they wanted to budget for.

For example, if a manager wanted to budget 500 units sold of a particular item, they had to enter a percentage value of an overall figure rather than the exact 500-unit amount, making the process cumbersome and error-prone.

Multi-currency reporting provides increased accountability at the local level

“The number of errors reduced immensely. When a line item needed to be changed previously by ten percent, it easily took a couple hours. Now it takes a couple minutes and it’s very simple for us to do.”

The ability to collaborate with other CompTIA executives in their native currencies and in U.S. dollars streamlines the workflow and provides the platform that CompTIA needs to more easily digest financial data from both headquarters and abroad.

Multi-currency reporting provides increased accountability at the local level, as users take additional ownership of the budgets they submit.

Centage’s cloud-based solution provides the global access CompTIA required along with a quick and easy implementation and a short training timeline.

Interested in learning more about Centage’s formula-free FP&A software? Book a demo.