Transforming Financial Reporting: Telegraph Media Group's Journey with Baud (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: I'm Andy Nash. I'm the finance director of the Telegraph Media Group. Telegraph Media Group owns both the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and telegraph.co.uk. It's quite interesting because when you look back over time it's quite difficult to remember what things were like before and only actually going through this process actually of talking to you I've realised how much has changed. I've been here for a number of years and over the period of time I've been here we'd gradually built up a plethora of spreadsheets which all interlinked together and that was, you know, inevitably became very unmanageable. Our financial reporting manager, Rebecca, was spending a huge amount of time updating those spreadsheets and creating them, getting them ready for every planning cycle we went

Speaker 2: through. I'm Rebecca Peach and I'm the reporting manager, planning manager at Telegraph Media Group. There were loads of inherent problems of using Excel. It was the bane of my life at the time. There was a budget cycle where there were numerous errors and that was definitely the catalyst for thinking we can't proceed like this. We're spending a huge amount of time creating Excel models. They're inefficient. They don't allow multiple users to be working in them at the same time. They're very reliant on one person to administer and they're very fragile.

Speaker 1: At the same time our business was changing enormously as well. So we were moving from primarily print-only business into something which would become much more digital. And so whilst we were trying to manage what we already had, we were also trying to adapt to something new and that was a completely different set of reporting requirements. So we decided we needed something which brought all our data together.

Speaker 2: I was constantly being inundated with partners calling up saying, look at our wonderful product, Simpsons being one of them. So I thought it was a good opportunity to have a look to see what was available. My first experience of Baud was actually on a demo over the phone and I was impressed with it straight away. And it just seemed really innovative and it was just new. It just felt modern in comparison to a lot of the other systems that we had seen.

Speaker 1: Probably the most profound change we've had is that we use the same model for everything from weekly reporting, monthly reporting, forecasting and budgeting. It's exactly the same model. We're producing very up-to-date information about how this current month is running and actually how this current forecast is looking to turn out. So from that performance, everybody around the business knows exactly where we are and is responding to that performance and trying obviously to make sure that we hit the forecasts and targets that we've set ourselves. I'm quite a frequent user of Baud. I go in on a regular basis to see how we're tracking against our forecast and our budget. Every week we have a refresh of the data and everybody, all of the finance users around the business input into that update and I am using that to make decisions about resource planning, about upcoming projects, about how much we're going to drive advertising, what kind of advertising contract deals we're going to get into over the coming year. So it does power quite a lot of decision making.

Speaker 2: I'm managing a team of 12 management accountants, ensuring that all of their inputs are in and that the numbers that they're giving are sensible and that they're well documented. So that's one of the real benefits of Baud because previously we were spending so much time with the input and the management of the models that we really didn't have that time to add value, whereas now as the reporting manager I can add the value by analysing and reviewing and giving appropriate comments. So we're completely on top of our numbers now. It's built real structure and routine and familiarity into the reporting process which didn't exist before.