What would you do if you freed up five or more hours in your work week? What if you could automate all the repetitive, mindless tasks that zap your energy? This is exactly what Mark Andrews, Treasury Manager at SoFi Bank, was able to do — streamline SoFi’s cash forecasting process, improve accuracy, and go from cutting and pasting to time savings.
For banks especially, it’s always good to know how much cash you have and are going to have. SoFi built a 10-day origination forecast to help them do just that. Here’s how they used analytics automation to streamline forecasting:
- Take data from multiple tables and combine the data into a data set to be used for cash projections
- Normalize data from different data sources and create buckets for categories such as days past due so that data can be pushed through the same equations
- Identify the loans that belong to SoFi, rather than loans that they’ve sold, to ensure calculations run off of data that’s in their balance sheet, not just in their data warehouse
For Mark, automating these small tasks made a big difference. “These [manual processes] are arduous when you have to do them daily. And why are we using a treasury manager to do simple cut and paste jobs?” Automation has helped free up Mark’s time — almost an hour a day saved from not needing to manually go through spreadsheets, check for errors, download files, and then produce the forecasts. Not to mention, automation also helps SoFi from a regulatory standpoint. By creating a system, SoFi has a process that can be easily audited.
While an hour a day might not sound like a lot, SoFi knows iterating on analytics automation across departments and organizations will lead to exponential time and dollar savings. Think about annualized savings: one hour per day, five hours per week, 20 hours per month, 240 hours per year. And that’s just for one employee.
With the time savings automated analytics has provided, Mark now has more time for strategic analysis, finding macro trends and insights, making data transparent to executive-level staff, and helping empower other teams with analytics. SoFi’s ultimate goal is to create a touchless/semi-touchless environment, where instead of having user intervention to run a workflow and create a report, workflows can be scheduled and automated to run.
For anyone looking to automate analytics at their organization, here are three key tips from SoFi:
- Create a framework to empower functional teams, but don’t rigidly stick to it because like anything in business, things change.
- Reach out to individuals to gauge their interest in new tech and analytics and find champions who can disseminate analytics through their groups.
- Develop a dedicated analytics confluence page or Wikispace to post information to and share with new people.
Ready to automate your cash forecasting?
Watch SoFi’s webinar on-demand.