Video · June 10, 2025
How BDO replaced hundreds of weekly emails with one unified Finance platform
About this video
BDO, a $3 billion CPA firm with 13,000 employees, was running a deeply manual FP&A process. Hundreds of weekly emails, 13 separate cubes, a disconnected dashboarding system, and planning and actuals living in different places made meaningful analysis difficult and time-consuming for the entire Finance organization.
OneStream consolidated reporting, dashboards, budgeting, and actuals into one platform now used by 2,500 active users. The FP&A team spends less time distributing spreadsheets and more time drilling into variances, finding anomalies, and analyzing forecasts. For a firm built on the integrity of financial data, having one governed, granular, customizable system has fundamentally changed what Finance can deliver.
Speakers
Senior Manager FP&A Center of Excellence | BDO
Key takeaways
- Hundreds of weekly FP&A emails and 13 separate cubes have been replaced by one unified platform. Consolidating reporting, dashboards, budgeting, and actuals into OneStream eliminated the distribution overhead that consumed the Finance team's time every week.
- 2,500 active users now have financial data at their fingertips without waiting onemailed reports. Self-service access to governed, granular data has changed the pace and quality of financial decision-making across the entire BDO organization.
- FP&A teams now spend their time analyzing forecasts rather than managing manual distribution processes. The shift from email-based reporting to a live, drillable platform means Finance can focus on finding gaps and understanding what is driving variances.
- One system for reporting, dashboards, and budgeting has driven strong user adoption across a finance-savvy organization. BDO's teams can still access the granularity they need while working from a single, simplified experience rather than navigating multiple disconnected tools.
- Customizable dashboards combining VI Blend and cube data give each user a reporting experience tailored to their needs. Pulling metadata directly into reports makes dashboards uniquely relevant to individual users while maintaining the governed foundation the whole organization relies on.
Read Full Transcript
My name is Nate Walgemuth, and I'm the senior manager for our finance FP&A Center of Excellence team at BDO. We're a CPA firm, so we do tax returns, audits of public companies, making sure their financials look good.
13,000 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and we're constantly growing. We have a ton of data at BDO. We had a very manual planning process. Every week we'd start off sending emails out in Excel and having to run through all these reports, send them out, probably hundreds of emails done by the entire FP&A organization.
We had 13 S-based cubes, a separate dashboarding system. Our planning and actual were in different places, so it made reporting difficult. So we need something to help us analyze that in a nice, efficient manner.
One of the big things that OneStream has unlocked for us is the time to do more analysis. Less manual work, less distribution of emails. We can drill into the data, see what's really driving variances, finding anomalies.
One of my favorite things is simplicity and user adoption. We have one system for our reporting, our dashboards, our budgeting, and it's all in one spot. Our dashboards have a combination of VI Blend and Cube Data, and are pulling metadata into our reports too, making it very customizable and unique to that individual.
We have a lot of finance savvy folks with us at VDO who like to drill into the numbers, like to see the data. They can still get that level of granularity they need in one spot, in one place. So now our FP&A teams can actually analyze the forecasts more, look for gaps, and get out of that manual work.
We have 2,500 active users in OneStream who can have that info right at their fingertips.
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