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Didi Gurfinkel is the co-founder and CEO of DataRails, a powerful software product that helps CFO and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals with their planning and reporting needs. Gurfinkle recently sat down with us to talk about his company and how it works.
Didi, can you give us an overview of your company?
I founded the company a few years later in Cisco. I saw how Cisco relies on Excel, and we decided to try to get Excel and convert it from a personal application to an enterprise application. The idea was to pull data from the company’s spreadsheets and sync all this data to a centralized database in the cloud. So users will continue to use Excel, but the organization will have control and control over a centralized database. Excel is an essential tool for financial professionals. We let them leverage and continue to use the power of Excel with the firmness of the database.
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How has your product evolved?
In the early years of the company, we sold this solution to banks, insurance companies and financial institutions for their compliance issues, data integrity and control solutions. Over the years, we’ve seen the value that FP&A and Financial People offer in combining financial integration, financial automation, analysis and the flexibility of Excel and the firmness of the database. So we decided to move the FP&A vertically from the horizontal approach of a platform.
When you look at financial professionals today, many are attached to spreadsheets. How does DataRails deal with their pain points?
When you look at financial people and Excel and spreadsheets, it’s a love-hate story. They have many challenges with Excel – the time it takes, the amount of errors and mistakes, the lack of analysis. Excel plane They do not have in-depth and multidimensional databases. So we actually combine the two. We maintain the flexibility of Excel and the familiarity of Excel, so they use the same tool with all products and use the best that Excel can bring, and we have attached the database behind it. So they have all the rigidity, the ability to drill with all the multidimensional and database layers, get full version control, get strong analysis, get advanced analysis. All these capabilities of a database are almost a product, but in Excel, it can take a few days.
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What are some of the ways that business finance professionals can make the most of today’s advanced technology?
Sometimes people try to solve everything, 100% of their processes. This is almost impossible, and even if you succeed and succeed in doing so, in a quarter or two, you will have another spreadsheet and another spreadsheet for further processing. So sometimes it is better to solve 80% of the problems than nothing happens. The most important part of digital conversion is insight – the ability to organize data into the right tools, the right platforms. You can still run a few manual processes, a few, a day or two months, this is not the end of the world. Focus on insights.
