Mutli-entity Business Simplifies Budgeting & Reporting

Price Family Vineyards & Estates is a family of vineyards and wineries in Sonoma County, California. The business includes 370 planted acres across several vineyards, as well as multiple wineries. Each vineyard and winery has its own LLC, with separate budget, P&L, revenues, and expenses for each.

“Our winery budgets are quite extensive. Prior to Centage I’d have a spreadsheet with 20 tabs, all of which were linked to a GAAP-based P&L on the first tab. I’d spend hours pulling all the information to it, and once I did, I’d spend more hours ensuring it proofed out.”

As the business grew, Shelly Golly, Price Family’s Controller, found it extremely challenging to consolidate the financial statements of each of the entities and prepare individual budgets for each LLC in a timely manner.

This process grew too complex to manage using only spreadsheets.

Upgrading from Excel saves time & eliminates errors

“I created and managed the budget manually in Excel, and it started to get really labor intensive as the businesses grew… All budgeting, forecasting, and reporting data would be manually entered from our accounting software reports to see how we were tracking to plan. I’d look at the bottom line and if it was off, I’d have to then find that dollar amount within the hundreds of GL accounts in the budget. Then you multiply that by multiple LLCs – I was spending days upon days to get the reports out.”

Before Centage, each LLC manager submitted their budgets to Shelly in Excel, each with their own formatting. Consolidating each LLC’s budget into a consolidated roll-up was cumbersome and time-consuming.

Efficiently manage annual budgets across separate business entities

“Creating the budgets this year was a dream. Each budget manager received a copy of their prior year operating expenses and updated them. In turn, I was able to upload those expenses into Centage. I copied last year’s budgets, updated revenue, and expense drivers, edited the operating expenses as needed, updated the personnel module and allocations and had a working draft in short order. As I met with executives and budget managers, I would make the adjustments in Centage. The process has been very smooth.”

After a smooth and quick implementation, Price Family Vineyards now has all of the budgets for its separate business entities integrated within Centage. Our FP&A software eliminates manual data entry and reduces the time spent, unlocking efficiencies that allow budget managers access to data in real time.

Now, when they enter data into QuickBooks, it flows into Centage and updates all financial statements automatically, following the business logic of each entity.

Streamlined driver-based budgeting & personnel planning

“If we’re using a credit card company and paying 3.5% merchant fees, then using a pre-built driver on that 3.5% makes sense. We have other drivers set up based on tasting room visitors, club members, sales volume, and even gallons  processed in our production facility.”

Price Family Vineyards finds Centage’s pre-built business drivers and allocation methods particularly helpful. The company uses these drivers to track expenses and revenue.

For example, the wineries have a lot of revenue-generating expenses, which is where the drivers come in. They also have employees who work for multiple departments and/or different business entities.

With Centage, the finance team can allocate these personnel seamlessly to the correct departments — a “tedious” process using Excel.

“With Centage, I can set up the allocations in the personnel budget, and it translates these allocations directly into reports.”

Quickly report consolidated budgets & forecasts to management and Sales teams

“Now more of my time is spent focusing on analyzing the data rather than spending time entering the data. Once the reports were set up as I wanted them, it just became a matter of connecting and refreshing, and I get accurate numbers to share with the team, and we can all feel confident about them.”

Reports for management that used to take days now take hours, including the time it takes to update the data, review it, and distribute the report among managers. Centage has also made it easier to analyze data with Sales teams.

Around the time they moved from Excel to Centage for reporting and forecasting, Price Family Vineyards also switched from a wine-specific accounting software to QuickBooks Premier because of its ability to integrate with multiple third-party software platforms the Sales teams were actively using.

Now Centage enables Finance to work closely with Sales to analyze ROI for different budget items.

“We run a lot of metrics to analyze our tasting room and club. By using Centage, I can add data points specifically related to these sales channels for our management to review. We have budget line items for our events, and this allows us to see the ROI on each event category.”

At present, Price Family Vineyards’ finance team is looking forward to digging into the capabilities of the analytics functions and letting Centage do the heavy lifting of the report translation from the accounting software.

Book a demo to learn more about Centage’s formula-free FP&A software.