Midwest Moving and Storage Company Chooses Simplified Reporting with Spreadsheet Server

Challenge

Planes originally used FRx for its reporting processes, a process that controller Mark Geis and his team struggled to navigate. “We’d generate a report in FRx, and then print it,” he said. Certain types of reporting or reconciliation required then sifting through the hard copy reports. Thus, information was not linked across reports, and Geis’ team spent hours manually pulling information throughout the entire month. Distributing reports across the enterprise each month took two entire days.

 When FRx support ended, it fell on the Planes IT department to keep the reporting system up and running, a burden that eventually prompted Geis and his team to search for another solution.

Knowing there had to be a better solution out there, Geis did a simple internet search. He came across Spreadsheet Server, and the rest, as he said, is history.

Solution

“I was in a meeting with our executive team and I showed three years of data,” Geis recalled. “Someone said they’d really like to see ten, and all I had to do was take one column and copy it seven more times, change the year up top, click refresh, and I had the data. There’s no more telling them I’ll get back with them on that. It’s right there.”

The team continues to learn new ways to combine data in Spreadsheet Server as business leaders bring ad hoc requests and new regular reporting requirements every month. The team can now do in five minutes what used to take hours.

Geis and his team appreciate not only the speed, but also the reliability of Spreadsheet Server: “When we give a financial presentation to our executive team, it’s close to 20 different slides that we present. Prior to Spreadsheet Server, we would reference our hard copy reports and retype everything into a fancy-looking presentation with colors and charts and graphs. With Spreadsheet Server, we change a date in a cell and the entire presentation updates automatically.”