How Beside turned a quarterly Excel exercise into a living P&L, 4x faster
The challenge
At Beside, accounting and transactional data lived in Excel files from the accountants, while business and revenue data lived in the data warehouse. Building a P&L or running scenarios meant manually bridging the two, on top of eight interlinked Excel files for projections. It was error-prone enough that the full financial update only happened once a quarter.
The team wanted to:
- Reconcile accounting reality and business reality in one place
- Stop the repetitive Excel projection process, commit to scenarios and measure against them
- Move from a quarterly exercise to monthly, living monitoring without adding founder hours
The solution
Outline brings accounting and warehouse data together, so the P&L is built on both. The team now edits and interrogates its P&L through queries, tests hypotheses without a day of spreadsheet surgery, and projections follow-up runs automatically.
Beyond the tool, Beside works with Outline as a design partner: a team shipping against their feedback, and an AI teammate that helps them build their financial monitoring.
Our P&L went from a one-off Excel exercise to something we query, scenario-test, and hold ourselves accountable with.
The results
- Financial reporting 4x faster, from quarterly to monthly
- Eight interlinked Excel files replaced by one queryable P&L
- Scenarios tested in minutes instead of a day
- Automated projections follow-up
Building a P&L used to be a one-off Excel exercise. With Outline, our P&L is flexible: we edit it through queries, stress-test scenarios in minutes, and hold ourselves accountable against them.
