My name is Kyle Silva.

I work at Oberto Brands in the Finance Department as a Finance Manager.

Oberto is a manufacturer and producer of meat products,

specifically jerky,

and we get into a trail mix.

We own several different brands.

What we do there is we manage Board,

but we also support our sales and marketing team,

assessing profitability of new items and customer innovation and also trying to understand our

forecasting volume.

We have a lot of pride in terms of the visual aspect of it,

but also the automation of Board.

Being able to reduce the time of the non value-added work is pretty big for our company.

We do utilize the training modules that you guys created.

Your web browser is great for those online modules and webinars.

So the first thing we got our new employees to start doing is going through those and,

just kind of getting their feet wet on their own terms.

So being able to have a new employee come in and say,

'Hey, your first two weeks, just go into the Board website,

use their training modules, and see what you can produce on your own,

and then we'll get you into our systems and really help you understand from the

Oberto aspect what we use Board for.

To someone that's considering implementation of Board,

I would definitely just ask them what their goals are on it.

I think a common trend is process improvements,

reducing human error,

getting away from the manual work.

I would definitely ask them what's their goal,

what's the objective, and what's their stretch goals with Board?

Because typically you're gonna be able to get those stretch goals completed as well.

One of the cases that we use Board for, that was well beyond the scope of why we initially purchased

Board, was our forecasting. We're actually in the middle of transitioning.

So we're kind of hybrid between Excel and Board right now,

as we work on how to effectively onboard, say,

40 sales people that have limited BI experience. The old

process for our forecasting

was sales would put it into Excel,

finance would review it in Excel and put it through to our other programs manually.

Probably about a six or seven hour process once a week,

limited visibility,

no ability to slice and dice the data.

We're in the middle of bringing our forecasting planning into Board,

and this will essentially allow Board and our other systems to talk to each other overnight.

Through the use of procedures and automation, Board is going to be able to push that forecast

not just at that weekly timeframe,

but every single night,

automated.

So that we would save us about six hours of work just for that one process. We will probably save 20

hours of work every month,

just on getting our forecasting out of Excel into Board and having both of our systems talk to

each other.

So Board has been able to really help us look at our data in many ways that we haven't before.

With Board, we're able to provide answers quicker to the executives, helping to make those decisions quicker.

Every meeting we go to,

people are updating it directly into the system

- the data - and we're reviewing it and drilling into very detailed information

that we typically haven't been able to get real time during

meetings.

One thing that we continue to work on is improving our long term financial statement planning.

So this isn't just the revenue forecast,

this is a full financial statement,

- three, five, 10 years out.

This is something,

when I first started three years ago,

it was about a month process and we did it once a year.

We're at the point with Board where we're doing this three or four times a year,

given changes in our company strategy or long term objectives that have shifted.

And it's really just having the procedures built once. All the reports built where we can add

the high level assumptions,

the ones that are really gonna impact the data, and having Board push it through. Using Board we'll use historic data,

plus the assumptions that we add, and produce long term forecasts by year,

all the way 10 years out. And we're doing that about three times a year now.

So at Oberto, Board is a big part of our month end close process.

We do use Board to actually produce our reconciliations.

Some of our journal entries are actually produced in Board,

we just export them

and send them over to accounting.

These are things that have saved us a tremendous amount of time and has helped us close within the guidelines

of our executives.

A clean month end is very different than a regular month end,

and with Board we're able to get a clean month end with the ability of,

having Board do all the manual work,

create the journal entries, and kind of produce the data,

giving us an extra day or two to do the full review and understanding the data,

having the journal entries in on time and having data,

that's accurate within the first week.