About Client:
One of the largest U.S. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), managing tens of thousands of single-family rental homes across major metro markets.
Background:
Every year, the FP&A team prepares a comprehensive financial and operating property budget plan. They use Anaplan to model projected revenues and expenses across the portfolio, and then reconcile this data with actuals in the EDW to support reporting for both corporate leaders and property-level managers.
In theory, this setup should have given them a seamless view of plans vs. actuals. In practice, however, the integration between Anaplan and the EDW was anything but smooth.
Challenge:
The budget load process was almost entirely manual. Analysts had to:
- Export budget and forecast data from Anaplan.
- Reformat and clean the files to match EDW requirements.
- Manually upload them into the EDW.
This took hours of repetitive work every cycle and often introduced multiple errors or delays. For a REIT of this scale, that meant:
- Slower budget cycles – delaying when leaders could see reports.
- Higher risk of inaccuracies – manual data handling left room for mistakes.
- Lost productivity – analysts were stuck doing data prep instead of focusing on insights and forward-looking analysis.
