Real-time Data-Driven Insights and Decisions - with Josh Schauer, CFO insightsoftware

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Josh Schauer, the Chief Financial Officer at Insight Software. I'll be covering three primary topics with Josh today. One, the challenges with fragmented data for financial decision-making from a CFO's perspective. Moving from historic to real-time data to assist and support financial decision-making. And third, the process of modifying budgets mid-year based upon some of that actual performance insight data that you get. So with that, Josh, would you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics at Measure Up podcast? Yeah, absolutely.

**Josh Schauer** (1:24)
First off, thanks for having me, Ray. I'm really excited to have the conversation here with you today. A little bit about myself really quick, a little bit of background. I've got about 15 years of experience in the private equity-backed software world, very heavily focused towards M&A acquisitions, mergers, so on and so forward. I've spent nearly six years coming up on six years here at Insight Software, and I've been fortunate enough to be the CFO for about the last year. Prior to that, I was running the FP&A team for the nearly five years before that, with a heavy focus on the forecasting process and then of course, mandating all of our different metrics, KPIs, et cetera, across the business.

**Ray Rike** (2:08)
Okay. Josh and I didn't know each other before we got introduced to do this episode and we found out that we both worked for a company that was acquired by Vista Equity Partners a long time ago, 10 plus years ago, called Accruent. Small world we live in, Josh.

**Josh Schauer** (2:24)
It sure is. It is a small world.

**Ray Rike** (2:26)
Okay. Let's hit topic one. So we conduct a lot of original benchmarking research programs and specifically focused on metrics and processes that the Office of Finance and the CFO are really interested in. And one of the top challenges that we've seen across multiple benchmarking programs is CFOs are challenged with the fragmentation of the data from across the organization and across all the platforms that decentralized purchasing of things like CRM, marketing automation, billing software, et cetera, has over the last 10 years. So how have you dealt with this challenge of fragmented data and insight to provide you a better and I'll say more near real-time insight into how your business is performing? It's that time of year again. You've got 37 spreadsheets, eight departments submitting plans in different formats, and somehow headcount plan V9 final is still missing two hires. Welcome to the budgeting season where FP&A teams juggle people, timelines and way too many spreadsheets, or you could use DriveTrain. DriveTrain is an AI native business planning platform built for modern finance teams. Easy to use modeling, real-time collaboration, and no spreadsheet chaos. This year, don't just survive the budget season. Take control of it. Visit drivetrain.ai.netrics and get two months free and 50% off implementation for a limited time. That's D-R-I-V-E-T-R-A-I-N.A-I-slash-metrics.
Yeah.

**Josh Schauer** (4:10)
Well, it certainly is a challenge. I'll lead by saying that. I think fragmentation of data, I think it can mean a lot of different things or it can at least be the result of a lot of different things. In many cases, it may mean you have multiple ERP systems, you may have non-system integrated acquisitions, you might have ad hoc spreadsheets and so on and so forth. At Insight Software, we've acquired a lot of companies in the past five or six years. We've done 32 acquisitions, I think, dating back to 2019, so we've been highly acquisitive. Thankfully, we've become quite good at finding ways to minimize or avoid altogether fragmented data, but that came on the back of a lot of lessons learned and a lot of trials and tribulations. If I go through the process here, it really starts with data governance and standardization on the front end, so ensuring that you're being consistent with data definitions, ownership responsibilities, quality standards, etc. on the front end. Because even if you have standardized data, but you've got different definitions for what that data is internally, that is also still a problem because it can be coming from one system, but be leading to different outcomes or different decisions across the business. So prior to centralizing your data, you really need to ensure that the data that's coming in is all of equal and consistent quality. That would be the first thing.