The Prophet Difference: Turning Knowledge into Numbers

Most BI tools (including lots of FP&A software on the market today) help users with the “numbers into knowledge” problem: there are unstructured data that need cleaning and/or disparate sets of structured data that need to be cleaned and aggregated together to produce a story about the business.

This is a critical part of the process, but building financial models has an additional layer, which I’ll call the “knowledge into numbers” problem. Finance professionals need to take their qualitative understanding of how and why their businesses make money and create formulas that describe the cause and effect relationship between non-financial business drivers (number of sales reps, retail store footprint, reimbursement rates, etc.) and their monetary effects on revenue, capital expenditures, etc. Excel clears lags behind many software systems on “numbers into knowledge” problems, but turning knowledge into numbers is where Excel thrives. It’s familiar and unstructured grid can make anyone a coder.

But just as Excel’s flexibility empowers users to put what’s in their head into code, that same flexibility presents a host of issues with model accuracy, human readability, best practice maintenance and intellectual property storage. Formulas frequently reference the wrong cells, include difficult-to-trace hardcodes, can be difficult to decipher and almost almost require explanations from the model creator before a 3rd party can fully understand all the levers in the model. This is also why so many FP&A software solutions require lengthy implementations that ultimately impose rigidity on a company’s models.

Prophet is the first financial modeling software to concentrate on this “knowledge into numbers” problem. Our software empowers users to be creators to unburden strategic planners from needing spreadsheets or a risky and resource-intensive implementation to build high-fidelity financial models. After building and reviewing hundreds of financial models from all business sizes, industries, and geographies we have codified our experience into a product that unifies the financial modeling process and drastically simplifies the financial modeling process.

We are excited to share Prophet with the world - shoot me a note using our contact form for a live demo!