Scaling Smarter: A Mid-Market CFO’s Guide to Modernizing Finance

Deploy in Weeks, Scale for Years

Being the middle kid can be tough. Or in the finance context, being the chief financial officer (CFO) of a mid-market company can be tough.

Investopedia defines mid-market companies as those with annual revenues between $10 million and $1 billion — a swath of the economy that comprises roughly 200,000 firms. With mid-market companies typically focused on charting an aggressive growth trajectory, leaders are increasingly looking to CFOs to find ways to scale and sustain that growth. Consider the results of OneStream’s Finance 2035: Return to Investment — Mid-Market Report: seven in ten mid-market CEOs and line-of-business managers expect the CFO to be an ambitious driver of corporate growth.

Yet that’s been easier said than done until recently. Unlike tech-nimble startups and early-stage companies, your mid-market organization has likely been in business long enough to be burdened by clunky, often incorrigible legacy systems. These systems require time-sucking spreadsheets and constant tinkering and review just to execute the fundamentals and ensure accuracy. At the same time, you’re trying to punch up to compete with major global companies — organizations with ready access to the resources and capital to take big swings on innovation and tech investment.

It’s a tough, demanding spot for a CFO. However, it’s not an impossible one. If nothing else, middle kids are scrappy and resourceful, determined to chart their own promising path toward success. The key to successfully charting that course largely comes down to finding an answer to a straightforward question.

The good news: there are now answers to that question. Fast-evolving artificial intelligence (AI) tools and technology are leveling the playing field for forward-looking mid-market organizations, so significant progress can be achieved in relatively swift and cost-effective ways.

As CFO, you understand the challenges facing your organization — and the need for sustainable solutions — better than anyone else. You can be both the catalyst and the champion for using AI to streamline processes and reveal opportunities to scale the business and achieve greater profitability. That’s true now more than ever.

A Purpose-Built Solution for Finance

At OneStream, we understand these challenges. We also understand the ever-increasing demands on CFOs. That awareness has guided our development of differentiated AI-driven solutions built for accelerating growth.

OneStream uniquely unifies all financial data — from close to planning, account reconciliation, and more — into a single, extensible financial platform. With it, finance can make faster, more strategic decisions. Our unified solution replaces fragmented processes, providing a single source of truth and reducing potential human error.

With financial and operational data in a single platform, CFOs can quickly gain crucial insights across the organization and drill down to understand the details — without the hassle of many steps or data transformations. Embedded AI-powered forecasting and scenario modeling ultimately combines historical operational data, external factors, and real-time information, so finance leaders can anticipate changes, mitigate risks, and uncover opportunities.

Built to Grow With You

OneStream is purpose-built for finance, with features designed to support your growing business as your needs evolve and gain complexity. You can solve your immediate needs with one solution and be confident you can build on the platform over time — adding capabilities without suffering through growing technical debt, and without the complexity of managing numerous unintegrated point solutions.

The Payoff

OneStream’s financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solution enables FP&A teams to do the following:

• Quickly address current challenges with a solution that deploys in six to eight weeks at a predictable cost.
• Eliminate wasted time spent on manual data aggregation and spreadsheet manipulation with flexible financial tools for budgeting, planning, and forecasting — saving teams an average of 58% of their time.
• Integrate financial and operational data to provide a single source of truth across the business, with a 72% increase in forecasting accuracy and reliability.
• Easily add capabilities as the company grows — without rework, re-platforming, or tool sprawl. Teams only need to load their data and learn a new system once, reducing the burden new software presents to smaller teams.

CPM Express: The Solution Built for the Mid-Market

Ideal for mid-market organizations, OneStream CPM Express brings together the financial planning, reporting, and close best practices of the world’s top-performing organizations. Those best practices are unified into one simple solution that can be deployed in weeks, all at a predictable cost.

With OneStream CPM Express, you get a quick, measurable return on investment (ROI). Implementation can take as little as six to eight weeks, ensuring a swift transition to the new system. The platform also considers your unique challenges and opportunities, putting you on the fast-track to greater efficiency and scalable growth. In other words, you can get started quickly with the confidence that you’re building on a platform that grows with you.

Real-World Impact: Mid-Market Success Stories

Below, we highlight two mid-market organizations, across two different industries. Both show why moving from a legacy system to OneStream’s platform is transformative for any finance team and company committed to growing profitably.

Stake Center Locating: Finding a Forecasting Solution with Big Rewards

For nearly 30 years, Stake Center Locating has honed its expertise in efficiently pinpointing underground utilities such as fiber, gas, and electric lines. Yet like many professional service companies, Stake Center’s finance team had long been challenged with accurately forecasting a range of factors impacting profitability. The company particularly struggled to predict workload and resource allocation for underground utility locating services — made more complex by the fact that each of the 48 states the company operates in has different regulations for underground utility damage prevention.

By adopting OneStream’s SensibleAI™ Forecast, Stake Center found the right solution. The company dramatically improved accurate daily forecasting shortly after implementation to drive short-term headcount planning and improve long-term planning — also incorporating seasonal variations, weather, holidays, and state-specific nuances that had previously complicated forecast accuracy. Now, the company can focus on what it excels at — finding underground utility lines — and doing so in ways that have boosted profitability.

Customer voice

“The system can find all those little idiosyncrasies that we never would have found.”

“It’s so quick to get SensibleAI Forecast set up with your data. You’re talking about weeks, not months or years. So the investment in SensibleAI is small for the reward.”

Cordis: Leaving Excel Behind for Improved Efficiency and Accuracy

Yvette Stanley is sleeping better today thanks largely to her high-tech medical device company, Cordis, moving to OneStream’s comprehensive financial consolidation, reporting, and planning platform. As director of FP&A, Stanley had spent years wrangling daily with the company’s outdated Excel-based system — time-intensive and prone to crashing and frequent mistakes. In relatively short order, the OneStream platform created significant efficiency and accuracy gains, giving Stanley greater peace of mind and eliminating the painstaking manual efforts that had defined Cordis’ financial management practices.

Customer voice

“I can now make dinner without having to be on phone calls or the computer telling people we need to change this or go back and look at that, that doesn’t look right. It’s a huge difference — I can actually go to bed before midnight now.”

With OneStream, Stanley and her team significantly reduced time spent on reporting tasks, enabling the team to focus on value-added analysis rather than data manipulation. The newfound agility ultimately empowered Cordis to meet the evolving demands of its CFO and other stakeholders, demonstrating tangible improvements in responsiveness and decision-making.

What’s Next: Your Path to Smarter Finance

While considering the next steps for your mid-market organization, remember that the right solution can transform your finance team.

OneStream CPM Express is purpose-built for mid-market companies, offering a unified platform that streamlines financial planning, reporting, and close processes. With rapid deployment, CPM Express delivers best practices from top-performing organizations in a simple, scalable solution. The platform helps you say goodbye to manual tasks and fragmented systems. Instead, you can say hello to measurable ROI, improved efficiency, and the confidence to grow your business.

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