Video · November 13, 2026
From Two Hours to Five Minutes: MCA Accelerates Financial Insights
About this video
Mobile Communications America (MCA) is a national leader in wireless communication and data security, serving sectors including public safety, education, and healthcare. With 50 acquisitions since inception, MCA replaced Excel-based consolidation with OneStream to automate reporting and bring financial and operational data into one source of truth. Senior Director of FP&A Alexandra Stockdale shares how reliable data and faster answers give her team more time for analysis and business partnership.
Speakers
Senior Director, FP&A | Mobile Communications America
Key takeaways
- Replace manual consolidation with automation. MCA moved from aggregating multiple ERP systems in Excel to OneStream, reducing data wrangling and reliance on hard-coded numbers.
- Create one source of truth. Centralizing financial data alongside headcount, bookings, and revenue backlog supports consistent monthly reporting.
- Maintain visibility through acquisitions. With 50 acquisitions since inception and roughly five per year, MCA uses separate pre-acquisition and organic scenarios across budgets, plans, forecasts, and actuals.
- Reclaim time for business insight. Reliable data access reduced a task that previously required two hours of manipulation to a five-minute answer, freeing FP&A to focus on analysis and business partnership.
Read Full Transcript
I'm Alexandra Stockdale. I'm the Senior Director of FP&A at Mobile Communications America. MCA is the national leader in wireless communication, data security, serving customers across multiple sectors including public safety, education, and healthcare. We are a company that is private equity owned, highly acquisitive.
We've done 50 acquisitions since inception. We do about five a year. Before OneStream, we were completely consolidating in Excel.
All the pre-acquisition data, when we were doing close every month, we were pulling data from multiple ERPs, aggregating it, and data wrangling in Excel. You were hard coding numbers in and kind of hoping that if someone copied a file over, the numbers would stay the same. We were spending more of our time wrangling the data than we were actually doing the analysis and partnering with the business for insight. What attracted us to OneStream was the ability to automate, the ability to get out of Excel.
We are using OneStream primarily for consolidation, but we also chose to upload data metrics that we report on monthly as well in our packs. So we upload headcount, we upload our bookings for the month, and then we upload our work in process, so revenue backlog, because we honestly treat those metrics the same way you would a financial metric.
We want all of our data to be in one place so we had one source of truth. And so in OneStream, we chose to create multiple scenarios to account for how acquisitive we are. So we have a pre-acquisition scenario and an on -watch or organic scenario for all of our budget, plan, forecast, actuals.
And so that has really allowed us to continue to have the visibility we need. My favorite thing about OneStream, it's really the time we've gotten back. It's the fact that I know that when I pull data, it's going to be correct. I'm not spending two hours manipulating data to be able to get the answer. I get the answer in five minutes. OneStream really allowed us the ability to act the size we are.
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