Item: Cube
Rating: 10
Author: Kevin Hoopes

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

QuickBooks Online doesn't have a robust or flexible budget capability, and filling that gap is what led me to Cube. I'm able to fully house budget and forecast scenarios, run reports and analytics, all within Cube. It's easy to shift a couple parameters, hit update, and refesh your report in the same place to run different scenarios. I tend to use it more frequently than the accounting software's built in reports, and now I've extended its capabilities beyond just budgets and into revenue and payroll. We tie all these things together to go beyond budgeting and into forecasting, planning, etc.

Pros and Cons

Intuitive - it acts as an extension of programs you're already familiar with, Excel and Sheets. There's no programming language to learn, no complicated portals to work within. If you don't know BI, you don't need to learn it. You can "Cube-ify" your existing spreadsheets, or build from the ground up. The functionality is similar to the way pivot tables work, so it's intuitive to learn and use.
Powerful - It wrangles all our different streams of data from different places and you're able to control it with a few clicks from an Excel sidebar
A huge shout out to the support team as well. I always have a dedicated rep at hand for help (what's up Riley!); the support articles are genuinely useful, which is refreshing for finance software; & they're always looking for product feedback to help adapt the roadmap to what's actually needed.

The only flaw that I find is something they've communicated that they're constantly working to improve, which is speed to load or fetch data. It can be time consuming to update and process a bunch of different reports. However, some important caveats: some of the lag is due to the way our company structure is set up; I have been able to re-design/architect my reports/sheets with speed in mind & to make things more efficient, and that's gone a long way; Cube has already improved the speed of fetching noticeably since I first got setup. I expect it will only continue to improve until it's no longer even noticeable.

Return on Investment

Time saved is a huge one. The budget & budget reporting process has been transformed from manual and tedious tasks to something much more streamlined and efficient
I'm hoping to use Cube to gain insight into our COGS and job profitability and find some actual $$$ there

Key Insights

Do you think Cube delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cube's feature set?

Yes

Did Cube live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cube go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cube again?

Yes

Other Software Used

QuickBooks Online, BILL, BILL Spend & Expense

Likelihood to Recommend

1) The budget process. In QBO the budgeting capability is non-existant, unless you like manually typing in every scenario and not being able to budget by class. Cube houses my budget/forecast scenarios & lets me view and analyze by my company's preferred data points; department, GL account, vendor, & sales campaign. I'm able to run monthly budget variance reports and plan for the future with ease.
2) We've begun using Cube to help analyze profitablity by sales job. We've never had such easy access to this type of info in the past, so this is a benefit I can directly attribute to Cube.
3) We're beginning now to use an integration with our payroll software to work on headcount planning and payroll analysis.

Intuitive & Powerful - Helps support a scrappy FP&A team

Overall Satisfaction with Cube