About Emergenetics

  • Company Size: <100 employees globally 

  • Industry: Learning and Development Consulting Services

  • Products + Services: Fractional CFO + Insights by Ascent CFO

Emergenetics knows what it takes to help individuals, consultants, corporate organizations, nonprofits, K-12 and higher education groups across the world build inspiring and inclusive workplaces to attract and retain top talent. In 2019, Emergenetics was scaling their business and knew it was time to bring in expert financial help and began working with the team at Ascent CFO Solutions.

The Challenges

Emergenetics came to Ascent CFO Solutions with 3 distinct challenges: 

  1. Five QuickBooks instances for each of their global entities operating in 3 currencies; USD, Euro and SGD.

  2. A time-consuming expense management process.

  3. No way to visualize the right financial information for the right people at the right time.

The Solutions

1. Five QuickBooks Instances + Insights = One Elegant Solution

Given the complexity and global nature of Emergenetics business, they were a natural fit for Insights by Ascent CFO. Built on top of PowerBI and other tools, Insights allows Ascent CFO clients to unify and visualize their financials from multiple data sources.

In this case, Ascent CFO Solutions took Emergenetics’ five QuickBooks instances that spanned three currencies (USD, Euro and SGD) and unified all of the financial data into a master file with a static currency rate applied. This allowed Emergenetics to roll all of their financials globally into a single view using USD. 

Prior to the consolidated view Insights gave Emergenetics, they were constantly building time-intensive manual reports to extract the necessary information about their financials. 

Now that Insights displays current and relevant financial information, it frees up more time for Emergenetics staff to spend on projects and activities to grow their business.

Bonus: Ascent CFO customized Emergenetics Insights views to match their colors, fonts and brand.

2. Expense Management Inefficiencies 

The addition of Insights to Emergenetics allowed them to streamline their expense management process.

Prior to working with Ascent CFO, the Emergenetics expense management process was a resource heavy, report driven activity. Each department leader would be emailed a static report with their team’s expenses from the previous month by the Emergenetics controller. They would then have to go back to the controller with questions, requests for more data and any issues the report uncovered. Ultimately the old expense reporting process wasn’t always accurate, helpful or dynamic. 

With the implementation of Insights, department heads now have access to a live view of their team’s expenses. They can drill down into specific expenses to uncover and resolve issues in real time instead of having to wait for a report to be sent to them. 

““Insights has been a game-changer for us, saving our company approximately 10 to 15 hours of monthly report generation. This efficiency boost has not only been fantastic but has also led to increased satisfaction among department leaders. They now manage team expenses seamlessly, eliminating the need for time-consuming back-and-forth emails to resolve issues.””
— Marie Unger, CEO, Emergenetics

3. The Right Information for the Right People

The third challenge Emergenetics brought to Ascent CFO was the lack of ability for specific employees and executives to see current and relevant financial information. 

Ascent CFO’s analysts got to work building customized, dynamic financial data visualizations for executives, the CEO and the Board of Directors using advanced permissioning so that Emeregenetics could ensure both transparency and data protection. 

  • The CEO Report

    Emergenetics CEO Marie Unger previously had to send individual requests for financial reports to her controller and Ascent CFO Jodi Mercer. This old way of doing things was inconvenient for all involved, time intensive and created a lag between when Marie needed information and when she received the information. 

    Ascent CFO built Marie a custom dashboard using Insights that puts all of her business-critical financial information in one location that she can access anytime that is convenient for her. The numbers update in real time so she can be assured she always has the latest and greatest data to help her make critical business decisions. 

  • The Board Report

    Ascent CFO worked with CEO Marie Unger and the Board of Directors to build a custom Insights view that allows the board to see relevant, real-time financial information about the company.

    Prior to Insights, financial reporting for the Board was a very time-intensive, manual process. Just like the reporting for the executive team and department leaders, reports for the Board were static and lacked the appropriate level of information. Insights allowed Emergenetics to visualize the company’s financials for the Board using customized graphs and charts instead of just columns of numbers. Visualizing the information in this way helps to contextualize the numbers, allowing the Board and Emergenetics executive team to have richer and more meaningful discussions about the company’s financials.

  • Leadership Reports

    As previously mentioned, Emergenetics came to Ascent CFO with 5 QuickBooks instances. Within each QuickBooks instance were five to six individual departments. This meant there were 25+ unique departments across 10+ leaders needing access to their team’s specific financial information. 

    Using row-level security practices, analysts at Ascent CFO visualized each department’s data to ensure leaders have access to their team’s financials, but not the financials of other teams or data not relevant to their role. 

    The impact of giving department leaders at Emergenetics access to live financials has resulted in the executive team’s ability to drive greater accountability across the company.

“Working with Ascent and our customized Insights financial data reports has allowed us to tackle challenges head on, improve our team’s collaboration and drive our company into the future.”
— Marie Unger, CEO, Emergenetics

In Summary

In partnership with Ascent CFO and the Insights product, Emergenetics accomplished:

  1. Self-service financial data reporting and visualization

  2. Huge efficiency gains for expense management and reporting

  3. Unification of financial data across 5 global QuickBooks instances and consolidation of currency to USD.

Interested in learning more about how Ascent CFO Solutions can transform your business using Insights by Ascent CFO?