Florence Timso, Canva: Canva is a global online visual communications platform on a mission to empower the world to design. We provide an easy way for users to create beautiful designs from presentations to documents to videos, infographics, t-shirts and many more.
We use Anaplan primarily within our FP&A function to power our planning, forecasting, and reporting processes. Our key use cases include our revenue forecasting, headcount and personnel expense forecasting, cost of revenues, and OpEx forecasting.
Prior to implementing Anaplan, one of the challenges we faced was lots of calculations embedded into one spreadsheet, which led to challenges identifying where errors came from. We’ve now moved that into Anaplan where it’s been significantly easier for us to identify exactly which assumptions and key inputs needed adjusting and changing.
Before Anaplan, our headcount forecast accuracy was sitting roughly at about 10% [variance against budget]. Since implementing Anaplan, we’ve been able to bring that down to 1½%, all within just a few quarters.
Anaplan allows us to connect data from lots of different sources so that we can consolidate that in a way that management can digest and help support them in making the decisions that they need to in real time.
I love the platform for its customization on the front end. You can build something highly customized to the end-use requirements without them ever needing to understand what’s happening in the background. You don’t need to be an IT person to build a model from scratch on the platform.
Our goal is to continue evolving our forecast process of Anaplan so that everything is connected, driver-based, and we never have to use spreadsheets again.
I’m Florence Timso, head of FP&A Center of Excellence at Canva, and we plan with Anaplan.
