Solution
For Biofire, it was important that any financial solution integrate and work with existing systems, to ensure real-time views into the company’s financial health. That meant taking advantage of Jirav’s integrations with Gusto for payroll and QuickBooks for accounting. The company would soon migrate to NetSuite; however, this would be no problem with Jirav. Biofire concluded that Jirav was a good fit to streamline existing processes while also providing the features that they would need in the near future with their continued growth.
Results
Today Jirav has become integral to Biofire's financial visibility and processes. “I am in Jirav nearly every day to monitor our financial status. Yet, the amount of time needed to manage our financial books is massively less than before,” said de Mierry. “As a one-person finance team, this enables me to focus on strategy.”
Biofire worked closely with the Jirav professional services team to get up and running fast--and now de Mierry feels very self-sufficient using the solution on a daily basis. His top use of Jirav? Cash flow management. Jirav helps each of Biofire department heads partner with the financial team on sharing up-to-the-minute information on spending, to facilitate smarter, well-informed decisions.
“Through Jirav I’m sharing budget dashboards with the head of every team, so they can see how much they are spending and on what, on a nearly real-time basis,” said de Mierry. “This makes it easier for me because the visibility that Jirav provides empowers them to make budget decisions. They can be more autonomous.” Also important are what de Mierry calls “the intangibles”-- the confidence of knowing that everyone in the company who’s using Jirav is looking at the same data, and that it is up to date and correct.
Time for budget management in particular has been slashed thanks to Jirav. “It all takes me a lot less time. For budgeting alone, to reconcile on a monthly basis took about three hours of work per budget per month, and we run three to four different budgets. Plus monthly reporting after the back and forth with the accountant was another two hours. I now save six to 12 hours per month.”
The Jirav dashboard provides a valuable real-time snapshot of the company’s financial health, while having the ability to drill into various models, all informed by the data pulled from ledger systems and payroll. “Our CEO likes how data is shown in Jirav. He even built his own dashboard to give him the view of the information, which he can then use to make informed decisions.”
Moreover, the Biofire leadership team values the reporting that Jirav provides. With its customized template, Biofire can send the Jirav-generated PDF report to shareholders every month in a few clicks. “We recently started sharing Jirav reports with our major shareholders. They are well formatted, and it takes just seconds to create.”
Jirav also played a role in Biofire’s strategy to scale. “We had been getting by updating historical information from QuickBooks because it’s relatively easy,” explained de Mierry. “However, doing the same thing from SAP or Netsuite, would be more time consuming, but we were ready for a more sophisticated solution. It was the right time for us to start using Jirav.” When the time came for the migration from QuickBooks to Netsuite, the Jirav piece of the process was easy--the support team simply copied Biofire’s model over to a new instance in a matter of minutes, and then made the connection.
The time savings have been meaningful for de Mierry. “Without Jirav, I would have spent a lot of time in Excel, which is powerful but much less efficient. If your drivers break in Excel, you spend hours tracking down the problem cell, whereas in Jirav you know exactly where to look.”
