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Customer Story
How Branch brings accuracy, speed, and insights to its scaling business
370
Employees
$225m
Raised
Insurance
Industry
Series C
Stage
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Results
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Causal lets us plan with confidence as we expand across the US. With each state having its own regulatory requirements and acquisition strategy, we needed a platform that could support the level of modelling detail, speed, and accuracy that the business required, and we found just that in Causal.
Greater confidence in accuracy
Improved growth forecast accuracy by 70%.
5 days saved per month
on financial close and reporting processes.
Real-time insights
shared to executive team and 20 department leaders.
The Problem
Modelling at a detailed, multi-dimensional level is crucial for Branch to understand their growth levers. While playing a key role in their country-wide expansion plans, the Branch finance team reached the limits of spreadsheet-based planning.
Complex multi-dimensional modelling
With four product offerings, an expansion from 5 to 50 states and a need to plan by product, geography, and acquisition channel, there was no chance that Excel could keep up with the level of dimensionality that the Branch team needed. This lack of model flexibility, increased workbook loading times, and endless manual transformations slowed the finance team to the point of paralysis.
Forecast accuracy
As a venture-backed company, managing cash runway is crucial for Branch. Having constantly changing requirements (new products, new territories), the broken cell references and the lack of audit trail made the team lose confidence in the quality and accuracy of their models.
Delivering timely insights
The size and manual nature of each model made communicating results to decision-makers virtually impossible. In their email instructions, each executive was told to close every application on their computer in order to see their models. Insights needed to be shared more efficiently and with more frequency — something needed to change.
Difficult to share
The Excel file was too complex to directly share, so the team had to maintain separate Google Sheets displaying simple outputs for stakeholders.
The Solution
The Branch team had to prioritise finding a flexible and scalable FP&A platform that could accommodate their detailed modelling requirements and better inform insights across the business.
Detailed Cohort Modelling
Our customer success team worked with Marley Spoon to build out their full revenue model in Causal. The model is at a weekly granularity, tracking each weekly cohort separately, spanning 6 years.
The model also spans 8 countries and 2 brands, letting Dina and her team drill down into any of the 12 combinations of 'country' and 'brand', as well as easily see aggregated views across the categories.
The total number of formulas required in the model was reduced from 6.5 million in Excel to a few hundred in Causal (a 10,000x reduction). Dina’s team are tracking multiple versions of the model separately using Causal’s Version Control functionality.
The model also spans 8 countries and 2 brands, letting Dina and her team drill down into any of the 12 combinations of 'country' and 'brand', as well as easily see aggregated views across the categories.
The total number of formulas required in the model was reduced from 6.5 million in Excel to a few hundred in Causal (a 10,000x reduction). Dina’s team are tracking multiple versions of the model separately using Causal’s Version Control functionality.
Data integrations
Marley Spoon’s model is using Causal’s live data integrations to pull 2 years of weekly cohort data for each country from their data warehouse.
Causal automatically refreshes the actuals on a weekly basis, and automatically compares them against different saved versions of Marley Spoon’s revenue forecast.
Causal automatically refreshes the actuals on a weekly basis, and automatically compares them against different saved versions of Marley Spoon’s revenue forecast.
The Outcome
Greater efficiency and accuracy, giving the finance team more time for strategic work
Strategic finance
With connected data and a series of dynamic models, the Branch finance team is able to plan in real-time while having higher confidence in their forecast accuracy.
Causal has allowed them to reduce the time spent on process management and maximize time spent on providing insights to all levels of the business.
They have positioned themselves as extensions of each department as they provide results, insights, and accurate forecasts that are baked in reality and data. This data and insight-driven culture has permeated across the business as department heads and executives can now track performance on a daily basis.
Causal has allowed them to reduce the time spent on process management and maximize time spent on providing insights to all levels of the business.
They have positioned themselves as extensions of each department as they provide results, insights, and accurate forecasts that are baked in reality and data. This data and insight-driven culture has permeated across the business as department heads and executives can now track performance on a daily basis.
Continuous planning
With connected data and a series of dynamic models, the Branch finance team is able to plan in real-time while having higher confidence in their forecast accuracy.
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